Jessica Jacobs
Postcards, After the Fall
From a defunct fiber farm in Western Massachusetts.
∞
The animals of Eden have grown old. Beneath swayback spines, the sides of their bellies almost
touch. The camel’s fur is clumped with dung and bits of hay and, one day, the second emu just
lies down and dies. The donkeys bray like sirens. One sheep’s rear legs barely bend; its hooves
drag the concrete pen, sending up no sparks. For a blade of grass, a peacock displays himself.
∞
The poet who owns this place steers the stead from her kitchen table. She wakes early, before the
world comes calling, to prop her elbows there and divine from coffee grounds her lapsarian lines.
Who needs Adam? Who needs Eve? There is paradise enough here for the rest of us.
∞
Crows declare from the bare branches of the beech trees, leaving the leafed boughs for birds
weak enough to need that shelter.
∞
A woman is dying in the back room. Her TV flickers while another beautiful day slumps off
beyond her window. We are staying in the room below and the sound of her chair’s motor floats
down between the rafters. It whirrs her upright for a bowl of blueberries with heavy cream and
six spoonfuls of sugar—sweetness the last taste left to her.
∞
Each morning, the emu peers through our window: deep amber eyes above a blunted black beak,
thin neck plucked to bare blue skin, his body is a cross between an ostrich, an umbrella, and a
disheveled epaulet. His feet are massive, blackened and leathery with dagger-sharp claws and
thick meaty pads. A vestigial talon crowns each wingtip, commemorating dinosaur days. Fluffy
pterodactyl, he eats the peach slices my wife offers while I watch from behind the lattice. When
she has no more, he pecks the top of her head. His thin feathers gleam.
∞
Along the chipseal lane, tiger lilies slum among ditch weeds. Nothing goes to waste here: teasel
pods are dried to card the wool, empty feedbags store the winter tinder, and scrub grass is
converted to milk and meat.
∞
In the daylight, we drag our mattress to the hallway, the only place in our room without
windows. Endless gratitude for the press of her thighs to my sides, for her warm weight, for the
sky shining in, her eyes met by the blue at her back.
∞
Even once all the grass is gone, the camel’s lips are gentle and searching on my palm. He lets me
pet his throat as though he’s beginning to trust me.
∞
Two pygmy donkeys, we call them the Balthazars, scratch their tired necks against trees bent
from years of that service.
∞
To be happy, the poet farmer says, an animal must have another of its kind. Goat with goat,
donkeys together. And, without a mate, the lone horse makes due with the camel. They graze
together in adjacent enclosures; when one is called to the barn to eat, the other races inside to
keep watch, staring over the fence that divides them.
∞
In the sheep’s paddock, we lie in the grass. She traces a message across my skin. Now your
shoulder knows something the rest of you doesn’t.
∞
The camel’s softest place is the warm valley behind his jaw. Around each eye, a muff of spiky,
sun-bleached fur. This farm is strange enough to make us, within it, children again, the world
new and full of wonder.
∞
Bravo, brave Maremma sheepdog, white wonder who noons in a pit dug beneath the picnic table
and sleeps nights outside the front door, is this farm’s protector. He chases bears from the cherry
trees, yet presses his head to my knees when it thunders.
∞
We have fought, falling into argument like we too often do, fast and with nothing much behind
it. She calls me outside to the folding green chairs, to the charged night air. Sits in my lap in
apology, points to the sky. The sheet lightning is silent, without companionable thunder. Bravo’s
fur flashes back its own bolts. The whole sky is a child’s night light, a midnight mountain storm
globe. She brings my reluctant head to her chest, wraps my arms around her.
∞
On farms, you learn to leave gates as you found them. What is penned must stay penned; the so
many things that must be kept out, kept out. Is marriage any different? Yet we’ve vowed to be
not just honest but forthright, to leave every gate open. No wonder this is difficult.
Jessica Jacobs is the author of Pelvis with Distance--winner of the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award--and the chapbook In Whatever Light Left to Us. Her second collection, Take Me With You, Wherever You're Going, in which this poem will appear, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in March 2019. An avid long-distance runner, Jessica has worked as a rock climbing instructor, bartender, editor, and professor, and now serves as the Associate Editor of Beloit Poetry Journal. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown. More of her poems, fiction, and essays can be found at www.jessicalgjacobs.com.
Return to November 2017 Edition
From a defunct fiber farm in Western Massachusetts.
∞
The animals of Eden have grown old. Beneath swayback spines, the sides of their bellies almost
touch. The camel’s fur is clumped with dung and bits of hay and, one day, the second emu just
lies down and dies. The donkeys bray like sirens. One sheep’s rear legs barely bend; its hooves
drag the concrete pen, sending up no sparks. For a blade of grass, a peacock displays himself.
∞
The poet who owns this place steers the stead from her kitchen table. She wakes early, before the
world comes calling, to prop her elbows there and divine from coffee grounds her lapsarian lines.
Who needs Adam? Who needs Eve? There is paradise enough here for the rest of us.
∞
Crows declare from the bare branches of the beech trees, leaving the leafed boughs for birds
weak enough to need that shelter.
∞
A woman is dying in the back room. Her TV flickers while another beautiful day slumps off
beyond her window. We are staying in the room below and the sound of her chair’s motor floats
down between the rafters. It whirrs her upright for a bowl of blueberries with heavy cream and
six spoonfuls of sugar—sweetness the last taste left to her.
∞
Each morning, the emu peers through our window: deep amber eyes above a blunted black beak,
thin neck plucked to bare blue skin, his body is a cross between an ostrich, an umbrella, and a
disheveled epaulet. His feet are massive, blackened and leathery with dagger-sharp claws and
thick meaty pads. A vestigial talon crowns each wingtip, commemorating dinosaur days. Fluffy
pterodactyl, he eats the peach slices my wife offers while I watch from behind the lattice. When
she has no more, he pecks the top of her head. His thin feathers gleam.
∞
Along the chipseal lane, tiger lilies slum among ditch weeds. Nothing goes to waste here: teasel
pods are dried to card the wool, empty feedbags store the winter tinder, and scrub grass is
converted to milk and meat.
∞
In the daylight, we drag our mattress to the hallway, the only place in our room without
windows. Endless gratitude for the press of her thighs to my sides, for her warm weight, for the
sky shining in, her eyes met by the blue at her back.
∞
Even once all the grass is gone, the camel’s lips are gentle and searching on my palm. He lets me
pet his throat as though he’s beginning to trust me.
∞
Two pygmy donkeys, we call them the Balthazars, scratch their tired necks against trees bent
from years of that service.
∞
To be happy, the poet farmer says, an animal must have another of its kind. Goat with goat,
donkeys together. And, without a mate, the lone horse makes due with the camel. They graze
together in adjacent enclosures; when one is called to the barn to eat, the other races inside to
keep watch, staring over the fence that divides them.
∞
In the sheep’s paddock, we lie in the grass. She traces a message across my skin. Now your
shoulder knows something the rest of you doesn’t.
∞
The camel’s softest place is the warm valley behind his jaw. Around each eye, a muff of spiky,
sun-bleached fur. This farm is strange enough to make us, within it, children again, the world
new and full of wonder.
∞
Bravo, brave Maremma sheepdog, white wonder who noons in a pit dug beneath the picnic table
and sleeps nights outside the front door, is this farm’s protector. He chases bears from the cherry
trees, yet presses his head to my knees when it thunders.
∞
We have fought, falling into argument like we too often do, fast and with nothing much behind
it. She calls me outside to the folding green chairs, to the charged night air. Sits in my lap in
apology, points to the sky. The sheet lightning is silent, without companionable thunder. Bravo’s
fur flashes back its own bolts. The whole sky is a child’s night light, a midnight mountain storm
globe. She brings my reluctant head to her chest, wraps my arms around her.
∞
On farms, you learn to leave gates as you found them. What is penned must stay penned; the so
many things that must be kept out, kept out. Is marriage any different? Yet we’ve vowed to be
not just honest but forthright, to leave every gate open. No wonder this is difficult.
Jessica Jacobs is the author of Pelvis with Distance--winner of the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award--and the chapbook In Whatever Light Left to Us. Her second collection, Take Me With You, Wherever You're Going, in which this poem will appear, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in March 2019. An avid long-distance runner, Jessica has worked as a rock climbing instructor, bartender, editor, and professor, and now serves as the Associate Editor of Beloit Poetry Journal. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown. More of her poems, fiction, and essays can be found at www.jessicalgjacobs.com.
Return to November 2017 Edition