Jane Mead


The Prairie as Valid Provider

1.

Not how when the city I love
shook itself down,
the bodies in the highway sandwich
smelled for days--
but how the kids in the mosh pit
kept on dancing.

Theirs is an informed despair--
it's all sweat and bashing,

but when they rise up,
thin shadows in the bluish light,
and plunge back toward the field
of upstretched arms--they know
those arms will catch them.

They know the crowd will hold them up
as long as it can.

Speaking strictly for myself here,
I'd say that that's a lot to know.

2.

Start from scratch.

Scratch is the prairie
and moonlight is your favorite season--

white when it lies,
white when the rain pours over,
white when it doesn't.

Hear the sheep crying
in the driving rain? Lightning
catches the world as an image
might catch history.

Then the prairie goes on
a long way, and it looks
like the sheep are just grazing.

Rot enters the rolled hay.

3.

It's true.
This is about love.

Could have been love
for the cryptic mysticness of happiness
as a thought.
But there was a man I loved
in that city.

Don't know how I ended up
back at scratch--on a green planet
watching the lightning,
mind like a minor civil division,
metabolism adrift and some
crucial parts missing.

The crocodile skull on the windowsill
is watching the prairie
for signs of change.

I am watching the croc
for signs of a name.

For a long time now
I have known
I was going someplace impossible--

I have known.

Olive, willow, memory.--

This is for the hypnotic jasmine
that grows outside my window.

4.

Exactly what kind of sleep
do you think you could use?

Like a flash for the world
to take shape in?

This
is no place for contradictions.
No place for argument.

I run water in the tub.
I turn off the lights
and light the floating candles.

When they sail under the leaky faucet
there's a hissing that could be
flesh burning, but isn't.

In the dark the voice
continues--Sooo,
is anyone here besides you
addicted to coke?

It's a private joke,
must be my private voice.

Lie still, my dear.

Might be something I read.

Is everything all right?

No, but lie still all the same.

5.

I miss him
like the end of the world
at the end of the century.
In which nobody wrote Fidelio.

Enough to make you want
to explode a sentence?

Enough to make me.

But the sentences have all been exploded.
I checked.

Book, bookmark, bed--we shall now
empty one out: one sentence:

"I heard a child asking
Where its legs were"
(By Grand Central Station
I Sat Down and Wept)

--and somewhere on a dark platform
a door opens on a history
and quickly slams shut.

And quickly slams shut?
And quickly slams shut.

As with "somewhere else
there was a bombing."

And somewhere else.
I can't tell you
the who and whom of it.
Can't even tell you the price
of the morning paper.

Just help me pull the bodies
out of the mud.

Grab that arm and drag. Good.

Now work a little faster.
This is not just any field.
This is a field of art.

Don't sully it no how.

6.

The moon and the sheep and the hay and the rain.

Once upon a time
there was a once upon a time.

Because you loved,
because you failed
came the space for greater sorrow.

What, if anything,
do we know?

How to make a bomb?
How to unmake a sentence?
How to rate a sorrow
on a scale from one to ten?

What the prairie said
was mercy the sky
refuses. Truth hovers
over the feasible landscape:

There is no god.
Loneliness is the lesser pain.

If I can be of use--call me.

7.

This is for the kids in the mosh pit.
Lie still my dears, sleep sweet.
The sentence the Angels unraveled
the wind plays back as music.

Angels? What Angels?

Play that back as music.

The music in the mosh pit's
hard enough to make you think of hate.

And when you listen to the words?

When lightning flashes on the prairie
it's gold all over green--all over.

And when you listen to the words?

O.K. When you listen to the words
you know that they want peace
just like we did, only harder.

Play that back as music.

Really the grass has tufts of white?

And the jasmine has yellow flowers.

Jane Mead's The Lord And The General Din Of The World was published by Sarabande Books in 1996. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, and Poet-in-Residence at Wake Forest University.