Reuben Jackson: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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November Poem

 

It’s the first cold November evening.

I am out driving

And there is a hitchhiker 

Bearing a sign

At a quiet intersection.

I ignore the Cecil Taylor on the radio

To read it.

Perhaps they are bound for some

Exciting destination,

Or a place that I have been.

 

As I drive closer, the words become legible.

DESTINATION, REUBEN JACKSON’S ARMS.

OH, HOW I MISS THEM SO.

 

I am jubilant, flustered.

I squeal to a stop. It’s Donna!

I thought she was married and happy in Philadelphia.

 

We do not speak, but embrace.

I produce tears, she produces a butcher’s knife

And quickly accomplishes her deed.

 

She is careful to wipe the blood

From the seat covers,

And places each finger in sanitary gauze.

I still love you, she cries.

A final kiss and that still potent smile.

 

She still loves me, I moan before dying.

She is still neat and considerate as ever.

My pupils lock on her lovely thumb pointing northward

Across the avenue.

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Reuben Jackson is the Archivist with the University of the District of Columbia’s Felix E. Grant Jazz Archives. He is the author of two volumes of poetry, Fingering the Keys (Gut Punch Press, 1991) and Scattered Clouds (Alan Squire Publishing, 2019). His poems have been included in more than 40 anthologies. From 2012 to 2018, he was host of “Friday Night Jazz” on Vermont Public Radio, and currently co-hosts “The Sound of Surprise” on WPFW in Washington, DC.

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Comments

[Hailey Leithauser]

Good stuff

[Denise Duhamel]

Ah, romance! A unrequited love! This is a wonderful rendering of loss via hilarity. Tragedy plus time equals comedy, equals this beautifully touching poem.

[clarinda]

What Denise said. Plus I am always grateful for a Real Surprise. Woo hoo.

[lally]

what a wonderful poem and poet and post....deliciously satisfying as well as provocatively poignant, or vice versa...

[Don Berger]

What a dream, shifting forward in each well measured line, each pulse, popping with surprise until its end when the speaker subtly actually never dies, whose pupils still follow that "thumb pointing northward." I love the clarity irony sudden horror/pleasure the fullest life-force of this poem.

[Beth J]

Love hurts. With that sweet tip on the arrow. Reuben Jackson says it so well.

[Howard Bass]

Great to see one of Reuben's poems here. I've admired Reuben's poetry and his approach to life for a very long time. Thanks for this, Terence.

[Bill Nevins]

A bebop murder poem with a good humored attitude throughout, and hey the speaker should have just kept listening to Cecil Taylor and kept driving on by. But whatcha gonna do when a beautiful ex beckons--delete her email? Just try! Great poem!!!!

[Terence Winch]

Howard: thanks for the comment.

[Donna]

What makes you think I'm not still alive? And married? In Philadelphia?

[Grace Cavalieri]

This is such an unusual poem for Reuben. Goes to show the man travels places that would thrill an astronaut. He certainly thrills us.

[Susan Campbell]

Terrific poem!

[Peter Kearney]

This poetic dream seems to confirm for the gifted author how intense is his love for Donna, but warns how dangerous that love could be. I am inclined to see this poem as the composition of one awake, but a real dream nonetheless.

[Eileen]

Great poem.

[Bernard Welt]

You know I have to love the dreamlike poem. In dreams, as in the multiverse, sooner or later everything that can happen to us, will.
It's great to see a young poet at the start of their career recognized here. Mark my words, this fellow is going places :-)

[Dr. Earle Hitchner]

The first revealing tip that the driver is viscerally distracted by the hitchhiker holding a sign comes in the sixth line: “I ignore the Cecil Taylor on the radio.” The music of pianist Cecil Taylor is, quite simply, not ignorable. A free-jazz precursor, Taylor deviated from bop and cool jazz with dissonances and single-note attacks of often astonishing ferocity. If you can turn your attention away from that, something else must be compelling you. (In the bio Reuben Jackson’s own steeping in jazz cannot be clearer than the title of his Washington, D.C., radio show, “The Sound of Surprise,” which comes from former NEW YORKER jazz critic Whitney Balliett’s famously succinct definition of jazz.) “November Poem” shares that slow, then sudden heightening of awareness leading to surprise. The poem also packs the jolt of accomplished film noir, executed with startling matter-of-factness and acceptance. The driver and hitchhiker collide in a way that’s almost wished-for, even foreordained. The poem is a marvel of deceptively easeful unfolding before and during what might be described as clinical carnage, followed by near-forgiveness ending in compliments for the hitchhiker: “still neat and considerate” and “her lovely thumb.” Like Cecil Taylor’s piano playing, the poem is virtuosically unsettling and may even tuck a threading snicker in its audacity. If Reuben Jackson ever decides to write other “monthly poems,” count me in as a rapt reader.