SageGreenJournal.org
voices out of the West, mostly poetry, personal to planetary
Elizabeth Jacobson
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Elizabeth was the fifth Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico and an Academy of American Poets 2020 Laureate Fellow. Her most recent book, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, won the New Measure Poetry Prize (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2019), and the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book. Her other books include Her Knees Pulled In (Tres Chicas Books, 2012), two chapbooks from Dancing Girl Press, and Everything Feels Recent When You’re Far Away, Poetry and Art from Santa Fe Youth During the Pandemic (2021), which she co-edited. She is co-founding director of Poetry Pollinators, an eco-poetry public art initiative that hosts an ongoing series of writing workshops and environmental talks in support of native solitary bees. For current publications visit:linktr.ee/ElizabethJacobson
Each Day Travelling
by Elizabeth Jacobson
Hello Buson!
I found another dead snake on the road today
and thought of you, the way you said Use the commonplace
to escape the commonplace. Your square face
framed many canvases— the ashen leaves of cold days,
one purple thistle poking through.
You walked a long way
with pebbles in your shoes,
sat above a mountain pond considering your reflection
until nothing remained.
Here, the foothills are full of coyotes,
and in my room I am surrounded
with the yelps of their longing.
The senses flood; the sunken islands of brackish grass
appear to float in the pond—
the whole world is in me,
an unrelenting grief that is each day travelling
so quickly into the next. How closely
you looked at things: Struck by a raindrop, snail closes up.
And then, dear Buson, and then?
You would have kissed me, I think,
on all sides of my face.
From Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air (Parlor Press, 2019).
Copyright © 2019 by Parlor Press.parlorpress.com.
Used by permission.