Colloquy with Dean Rader and Emily Dickinson —for Jack Houston Self, 1937-2019 The future (not being what it used to be) gathers into itself such poems as you might have written, might have loved if you had written them like that slant of light, the distance on the look of death you have learned to love as well. So throw the windows open, Breathe the good air and love it in your lungs as long as there is, breathe the O2 at night loving the deep warm sleep it gives you. Remember to love the Ides of a morning sky just as you love the arc of a new moon’s nascent edge. Throw the windows open— let the street voices back. Start to listen again to the chuff, chaff and bang and god damn you to hell from friends you forgot last year, and even now they’d rather see you dead than admit— what, what do they have to admit? Don’t blame them; the plague that divides us will never disappear. Never again will we sleep unstalked or with some Nazi’s gun unpointed at our shoulder. As the planet declines into Anthropocene we may find again we all are one—no dispensation or heart’s purity saving one over other. But in the meantime love the gratitude you feel for the world for the rich and splendid sound of its solemn music, not forgetting the rag, bone and banana of its showtime banjos, accordion squeeze. These you can store in what your brother calls your possible sack. And always remember Jack: Jack, whose love for the world stretched out into highways and hedges and compelled them such little children and hulking beasts as he found, such grapefruit smugglers and cranks, such barflies, thieves, and kudzu farmers unjudging— compelled them to come in.
Events of 1939 Like so many others you’ve watched that place in The Wizard of Oz where the black and white world (albeit sepia toned) blushes into technicolor too many times—when did you first see it? It can’t have been in nineteen thirty- nine; you were too young then to be taken to the picture show—must have been later. At this distance you recall many things from that time with vivid hues, but of this thing you remember only the effect, the intensity of it, how it made you feel. For a magical few moments you were Dorothy in her blue and white gingham dress stepping out of the dark. You didn’t think of the technicolor world as normal at all; you had been seduced in picture- show mode to believe that all around was merely—not black and white exactly, but grayscale, a word, an idea you wouldn’t learn until much later. And at first, of course, you didn’t see the witch’s red-shod feet, wicked though transformed by rhyming into a foil for Dorothy, who is not. So that the little girl in red in Schindler’s List is another Dorothy though only her coat is red. As she walks, never herself stepping out of the dark, with seeming calm through terror of grayscale Nazifying Kraków; at first her color fades in and out, sometimes disappears altogether as she seems oblivious to shots fired, suitcases heaved off balconies. One of many shots blasts grayscale into something else as bodies fall, one falls just behind her as she makes her way with others through strangely crowded streets. So that the color of her coat is prophecy, she is prophecy— a children’s choir sings in the Yiddish background a song of a Rabbi teaching other children their Hebrew letters. Later, hiding under a bed on an upper floor behind a door she steps thru, her coat unblushes. The color of her coat is prophecy of innocence and its terrifying loss and all that was lost with it that day in Kraków. Later, as her red-coated body appears on a cart with other dead, that too is prophecy, terror made all the more intense —by colorized suggestion.
Nomad Country We come and we go That’s a thing that I keep in the back of my head —Paul Simon . . . fragment of song that came to mind just now as I putzed around the kitchen, ‘Who am I to . . .’ needed some help to finish . . . These days I sleep pretty well days and nights someone might say of separate peace. True, I could have died eighteen months ago, thought I was dying perhaps in the chaos of falling down strokes and gasping for breath: but I never wished to die—set that down as a given amongst others. Still I feel I am one now with dispossessed my imaginary sees encamped in the Arizona desert (along with Cochise, perhaps, and his Chiricahua over that rise there, with John Brown And Nat Turner, plotting some bloody revenge), but my peace is separate—I have O2 at night. “Who am I to blow against the wind?” Is it moral earnestness makes us one? I’ve hardly been driven mad by work at Amazon or torn apart by gun-crazed terrorist minutemen; not even stalked by the common hungers of houselessness— homelessness I’ve escaped. I’m not in jail, don’t fear police except abstractly, don’t work in a meat-packing plant or live in a nursing home— my peace is separate though, because it’s privileged. Like movement nomads I am deadly white; “that colorless all-color of atheism, from which we shrink.” Conditions I’ve escaped save death, proceed one way or other from my country’s rotten past, more rotten present—next thought is what if we’ve all escaped? What if we could still believe that freedom came from those lofty words of guilty Jefferson. Would my felt kinship with these exiles then be wide enough? Wide perhaps, as the exile of Ishmael, who knows the end of his adventure as he introduces himself, “Call me Ishmael” —already buoyed by Queequeg’s coffin, thinking of Job? And the bond that stretches between us, what if it were a comradeship of all who have escaped alone? No need to tell, but I’ll tell it anyway: Who are we to blow against the wind?
Lament for the Makers What, O reverend Chaucere, rose of rethoris all, if Dunbar’s rose of rethoris followed venereal logic? Should we then imagine a quire of Chaucers meeting under your box at Westminster Abbey Friday nights for some glee and perlou? Indeed, what if word got ’round that the Westminster Friday fish fry served the best heavenly brew and you (here meaning one) could try wits with the likes of Frankie Beaumont, Ben Johnson, the Virgin Queen herself who sometimes snagged her headless cousin to slum along and bring the Black Prince still conning some lines Will Sheakespear put in his mouth? Would there then be a virtuousity of ’em, such as might assemble in pandemic mode, a Zoom, a Golden Targe of poets, a declamation a kerfuffle, clowder, clump, enjoyment, enjambment, stanza upon stanza, an anthology, a seethe crowding up to table like Koi at feeding time, keen to be first. Could we get them to social distance and choir together before the feast for a TikTok extravaganza, whence they would toss off veneries such as a Conan Doyle of trebles, a Moriarty of altos, a Coronet of tenors, a Baskerville of Bases, the whole bearing such double thickened and deep harmoniousness as might shake even the slumberous Tennyson out of his grave nearby to join? And since the bard, himself, couldn’t be invited, he being off in Stratford, how about after the pandemic each New Year’s eve they have an open mic, throw the place open to whatever ghosts stray in from memorials nearby or ’round about or farther afield― then the corpse of Bobbie Burns might stand in his coffin and offer a parting glass but not be able for want of wit and all his auld acquaintance to recall a proper toast . . . where was I, Oh yeah, what then, O Dunbar’s rose― how do you like your blue-eyed boys and girls?
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Julian O. Long’s poems and essays have appeared in The Sewanee Review, Pembroke Magazine, New Texas, New Mexico Magazine, and Horizon, among others. His chapbook, High Wire Man, is number twenty-two in the Trilobite Poetry Chapbook series published by the UNT Libraries. A collection of his poems, Reading Evening Prayer in an Empty Church, appeared from Backroom Window Press in 2018. Long has taught school at the University of North Texas, North Carolina State University, and Saint Louis University. He is now retired and lives with his wife, Kathleen Farrell, in Saint Louis, Missouri.