Jackson’s Hole
Jackson’s Hole
The murdered woman is a muse
Whom Jackson sees above the sound
And hears in footsteps on the floor
Of sand below and sand above
The treetops beat the ground
But Jackson won’t mind the wind
He has to go tonight his tune
Like a drowned man’s croaked
By crows and jays through empty
Plazas, blocks of granite, planes
Of glass, steel stockades, majestic
Jokes of jointed shadow
Dispassionate and dreaming;
Papers race through columns locked in eddies
Sucked by frigid updraughts into branches
The wind torments the trees with tinsel
Ripping down to kiss and whisper
Words of ice that drip off lips of vapour
When dawn ignites the towers
In calicoes of flame and sea
Scrawled with black calligraphy
Hump-backed garbage trucks emerge
And trundle down the buckled streets
Ingesting bags of trash and a frost bitten derelict
Whose eyes Jackson follows like tailights
To the river lost in stolid echoes
Public halls of marble driving the sweats
The man of spindles, planes and thread
The nervous spool man of the pictures
Unravels in the light of the modern registrar
Bleak renditions of bureaucracy
Dissolve to polka dots, the hammered links
Of footsteps that slide off fractal feasts
Volutes, combs, beards and blooming increments
Barnacles dart tongues at feathers, beams and barbs
There’s no color or fact to hang a man on or sex
To pin a woman to in the warm current
Jetting through the cool phosphorescent algae
That drift and cling to fingertips, the nails turn soft
And newborn blue, skin shrivels and cracks
Eyeballs bulge and every vein throbs to the bursting
Wasted effort finally requites
With extravagant light
The teeming apricot of June
The stiff and smiling nephyte
Jackson’s hole is true