Sun
of the Son
Vernon L. Jackman
Starloving Books
Ithaca, NY
Sun of the Son
Vernon L. Jackman Copyright 2012
Starloving Books – Smashwords Edition
All rights reserved
Cover Art by Edwin Jackman and George Sheldon
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the editors of the following, in which several of these poems have appeared, sometimes in slightly different form: African American Review, Praxis, Watu, The Community Review, The Ujamaa Gazette, Essence (At William Paterson College), The Risley Review, and Obsidian II.
Poems in this collection were awarded the following prizes at Cornell University:
* The Corson Bishop Poetry Prize
* The Dorothy Sugarman Poetry Prize
* The American Academy of Poets Prize
Vernon L. Jackman 1963—
Sun of the Son
ISBN 978-0-9829371-2-9
For Irving DaCosta Gibbs
1943-1976
Upon this rock the bearded hermit built
His eden:
Goats, corn-crop, fort, parasol, garden
Bible for sabbath, all the joys
But one
Which sent him howling for a human voice.
—Derek Walcott
I chant the songs I loved of yore,
While on the sunned and rocky shore
I dry my robes, all wet and clinging.
—Alexandre Pushkin
There are certain dreams that boys have
living by the sea
—Edward Kamau Braithwaite
I
Dawnscape
Sails flesh out and shiver,
nightshift insects lose their bleat
in the click and wail of cicadas,
angling louder to the incoming
light. That seam between dark and day,
tailored in roughly.
Attempts at waking. Birds.
An old woman reveals herself
through fret and stagger,
through the grate of leather,
hollowed on cool tar;
and a road coils grey,
straining to the foot of a hill.
Who sees it first?
The too sudden light reveals us,
returns the brutal outline of shacks,
and galvanized roofs that blind.
Light scuttles back the choppy talus
of our nakedness. Below,
the water changes its ridges; winds alter,
swilly with half-awakened syllables.
Birds shrieking?
or the screech of the island’s limestone ache?
Branches stir. Lapsed,
water drains: a cool finger
down the spinal groove in a leaf.
[To] Seamen
And bright ships left you this or that in fee
Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,
Strange spars of knowledge
—Ezra Pound
A moorage of rough men always stood
in the harbor: lank, piercing masts
with white shirts billowing out
into spinnaker and jib.
They were wrack, blown off the sea,
broken voices
that loomed upland,
heaping the island with splinters.
Their women would gather like a Sunday of widows,
cooled under dark umbrellas, and to sons
these were dim, forgotten fathers
makeshift heroes, exiled from storybooks
with their salt-eaten hands.
For treasure chests, they brought arks of legend
rattling with dry seeds that took route.
They became landships:
vessels of delightful rumor,
swinging out on frail booms,
climbing the rickety gunwale.
Hannibals and Mensas in their wreckage,
they could bring only
a spoil of strange talk,
shards of borrowed wisdom and fable,
dragging their germ like a cottonwood storm.
Shipwrecked
After stew and seconds
the church elders lie under trees,
all bloated and groaning like injured cattle,
and on the sand nearby,
flies build their saw tooth music
hewing down an egret’s carcass.
The coast turns to a spindly flicker as
boys wriggle from banishment under dark thighs
and search eastward for anything familiar.
Excursion buses heap along shore
like launches broken in a storm;
the red trim and brittle yellows
strop their image on the ocean’s rib. They came
plowing down the drift of heat, sluggish,
with folk songs and gravy creaking their keels;
down Horse Hill, where the shoals
tilt, and erect a patchwork
of churning sea and shingles. Rocks
jut through the glare, and below,
Crane Beach
bristles with mile trees and dark streaks
where children play.
The air shimmers with the wiry darting of a boy
as he chases the silver trace of fry,
trapped in a rock pool.
The sea crackles
and washes up a tangled solitude,
leaves him, sovereign to a bushy clump.
Erato and Clio came to him, punctured sleep,
slim like rods shaped in ivory,
laying false tracks
where only a darker heel
had etched the hard sand.
And the ancestors fell on him in windy spirits,
like stars wrenched from their pivot.
But stranded from the church outing,
he wants no muse or history.
He rears up in a sodden bole
with a shak-shak for scepter
and a tin can crown. Some boys return
to the coolness under aprons,
tented up into floral skies.
The elders squirm and rumble.
Cordia petals spiral downward,
settle on them like wounds,
and that fragile haze must be their souls.
Sun Song
After Gary Soto’s “Desire"
Starvation is simple. A few days by the edge
and your belly cramps with needles:
trembling desire,
fills up with sunlight,
warm as porridge, but weightless.
That nervous echo of blood
beats the walls inside
as trees (angered and hurt in a storm)
hurl their limbs on frail houses.
Sea wind turns to cobwebs
getting sticky between your fingers,
and you’ve taken up a wayward kinship with the sun,
walking shore in stiff, salty rags.
Noon bleaches the crescent bay hard and bright.
Bareback, your skin tempers like a steel drum.
If berries blew down in green shower
striking the hollow of your back
you’d break slowly
into a familiar, saddening song.
Birds are pecking fruit for their fill of music.
An almond, speckled purplish, opens
like a woman’s love,
and dry leaves rock downward, cradled in air.
You hunger now. Birds tidy their nests
and fly toward sleep.
Trees go cool and silent.
But you endure along the coast
kicking sand into a darkening veil—resolved
to curse the fat smiling moon,
and those whispers, coddled in grassy spaces.
It is fruit you want:
that copper almond, fallen in the bushes
with its tiny wooden bell
plumb or mango, a fig to push a thumb into
and part slowly: the flesh wet, dark before it's pink;
its sigh blowing from another mouth.
Stones in the Sea
Helpless as a turtle capsized,
the island kicks and rolls.
Crusts of land bob,
sink, and come to view. First,
the telltale crest
of smoke and clouds
lumped hills, then the hot
grainy plage, spraining
the spectral needle. Islands
with their bearded coasts
and secrets, rise in welts
on the broad back of sea.
Heat walks the coast
like a living man. He gets up
mad, with a headache,
his cutlass and crocus bag. He hates
the scrubbing grate of pebbles,
washed up
washed back.
When he drags his jackass to the water,
he doesn’t like to swim,
only lies afloat, drifting,
breathing through big
limestone pores.
Legend tells how
he was the first inhabitant,
bobbing, half man, half island.
When the grey ships anchored
and sought to shackle him,
he became man,
and moved inland—
the anonymous hermit
—tending his goats and asses.
He doesn’t take too well
to tourists or newspoets,
snapping off salty chunks of his soul,
stinging him
with pins of heat like sea lice
or man-o-war. Ate two
this morning. All they found?
a gaping lens full of sky
and sea, a few strands of hair,
and paper clumps inscribed
with high-sounding scribbles.
The artful clink of stones, tiny
like bells of sand,
does nothing for the rage
of the sloping giant. He prefers the cliff
and the stench like flesh and soil
furnaced together. For a while
he tried to get along peacefully,
cloistered in a ratshellshack, kept himself
out of the blue sp/eye glass
leer of visitors, all wanting their shot
with the native beast,
envied icon for the scrap
-book and slideshow clique:
…and here we are, Bob, with one
of the real island people…draining
his bitter nature.
But the government kicked him out
and named the caving heap
a landmark to first white settlers.
It was here one evening,
between the canes and that sudden drop
into the bay and twilight,
that they chased him, the giant—
the man-island-man, through the gully
sweating and stink, touching him
with torches, tonguing his black raw
with cat-o-nine-tails. Should have seen
that huge eff-er take off and run,
ducking from Winchester and Nikon,
dodging the pai-pai and clicks;
tearing down hills, causing mudslide
all the while his big sex flopping,
making that hollow
flesh-sound, and there—
charred and cursing, his hair thick,
marshy with blood,
over that chalky cliff he went
down to a sea darkening
just for him.
You could see his body, traced
in a brackish rim of shoal,
with sculpins and shooters
bunching around the scar
of his privates, shadow of a man
face down in the water,
whipped silent, white
spume bleeding from his breakers,
and his nakedness covered
with these sucking shells.
Brain Coral
What the sea ponders:
deaths,
lives, distilled,
quickly reckoned up
and stored in solid lobes.
Underwater, the reef,
pocked and ridged
with model cerebra,
hums
like machinery, smooth;
breathes: thinking factory.
It is bubble busy,
assigning
disposing: how many to drown,