Four Poems by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

 

Instant

 

A flower, a flame, a buzzing

object; what might be held

in a bottle, or a box that used

to be called crystal, though

it was merely simple plastic;

perhaps in your palm where

you once exhibited amphibians

and other juvenile ephemera

to the delight of your siblings;

or a bean that beckons as if

an unremarkable nerve swiftly

running toward its last impulse:

When we die--we in the collective

sense, rather than the royal singular--

because we were incidental,

unacknowledged, a glitch or

an echo--neither a bruise

nor a blister nor a dent in

the heather will outlive us,

because we were always

racing against mirages,

testing solids against

figments; losing when we

swore we were winning,

in a snap of a thumb

against puckered fingers.

 

 

Somnambulance

 

I lost this poem on my way to you

in somnambulance; what could

have been proof of my existence,

traded for a film made by rapid

eye movements, and the forfeit

of my conscience. It was my mother,

the depressive, who came into my

my room during those minutes

when I was wrestling with my principles;

to untangle me from sheets and blankets,

if only to have me sit with her, debating

what was on the television. As a young

man, my father struggled mightily to reach

a dormant state, and woke up exhausted

at sunrise. There is no bargaining with

the doldrums because you can’t plan

your illusions any more than a prophet

accounts for his epiphanies. They are

the result either of years of effort—or—

in a moment—the release of pressure

in the right lobe, agreeing to relinquish

the argument.

 

 

Storms on the Sun

 

If I could place you at an angle,

artificial or grimacing,

I’d want for you to catch a glimpse

of the singular filaments

cast off from storms on the sun,

then showered down to

our own soil for glut and excess

needed to feed the germination

of our seconds; our moments

and history, our attempts

at what refused to be knotted

though somehow was made

coherent, like threads braided

out of disregarded consequences.

If you like, you might call me

a fabulist, but I can demonstrate

the bias in every fabric;

or how breath cannot be

separated from its reverse

or its opposite. In limestone

and silica, flares, and furnaces,

we are made to bend into

schemes of embrace and banishment;

to glide and dive like certain

creatures facing the threat of metal

or the sheen of polished weapons.

If I manage an escape,

my neck lengthening,

my arms into feathers, I

might find a place in the revolution

of constellations; I might remain

with you, undivided in memory

and stores of patience; and you

might follow on paths taken

by whirling dervishes, acquiescent

to the center and the logic

of a new universe.

 

 

The Length of Thirteen Years

 

Count the days if you care;   

save the calendars before

they’re converted to flavour

the air for a made-up parade,

filmed for a scene in a movie

no one remembers in the present.

Or track minutes lost though they

technically lengthened by hours

the game my father detested,

boycotted the league, forbade

his daughters from ever attending. 

This was how he dealt with old hurts,

political debacles, campaigns in which

he ventured nothing and yet a century

has made the stakes obsolete: bones

and headstones extraneous to the epic   

he had exclusively gathered into

an ever-shrinking volume, because

blankness can go finite if asked

to retain more than it is meant to bury.   

Right after he died, I got lost driving

to the airport though I had arrived,

departed, picked up and delivered

people there forever.  I had gotten

wrapped up in the sports commentators

lamenting the aimless expansion

of baseball games, bleeding

into three hours, maybe four, losing

hold of the fans and attendance figures,

commercial revenue and television ratings,

the golden goose and civic enthusiasm

gone the way my father had, one errant

second after the other, until they’d have

to track it by nanos, or yoctos, or zeptos,

dividing the speed of light by moments

photons take to travel across atoms, rather

than force people to be still in a deluge.

Thirteen years later and they have finally

figured how to gain control over this

permeating loss, and I am left wondering

how the physical can become chimerical,

exiled from the city my father

taught me to love like a cause,

a principle, or a fiction.

Jane Rosenberg LaForge is the author of four full-length collections of poetry, the most recent being My Aunt's Abortion (BlazeVOX [books] 2023). She also has published four chapbooks of poetry, a memoir, and two novels. More work is forthcoming in The Healing Muse and Evening Street Review. She reviews books for American Book Review and reads poetry for COUNTERCLOCK literary magazine.