Ultima Thule 1945
by J.L. Jacobs
But at this time there are no remains of that nation.
What water I have here sits stagnant. It is your prayer and your small hands to the wrist.
We know the mountains the seven sisters themselves and the look of a woman through a window.
I return to the well in hopes of seeing her. A far-fetched woman a poet even in summer. And still turn eyes garb and manner.
Darkness comes down quickly and clouds gather black to the North by noon.
It is her throat and her hands A borrowed woman who moves slow-footed backward within her house.
A dreamer might see this: And count the echoes—her turning shoulders Of shoes—outright. And did their eyes on trees? Then the moon?
We sing her of her dance over a dark girl’s shoulder.
Of a storm an hour ago and mist that is ever-more-constant.
I know also the hymn as rain knows night or an old house in a clearing and She choked with flowers.
North to their wives and dying hymns
You will lift a curtain and I plot
the angle. Your throat as dry.
There are names beyond our selves. Beyond her
barefooted morning.
Finger her ear. Enlarged. As under
blue. You are a sound delayed
before a rainstorm dismantled. She
toward a more calculated pale childlike hairless.
It is a clearer memory of wings and the sun at mid-afternoon.
This is the basin of the foothills. Disordered wood
mild and more near. Who will plant the late lands?
I repeated. I remained to eavesdrop as a heron
on one leg. Ledged roots in.
May without rain
I.
These postcards of women.
They take of traveling.
It is evening ascertained.
Six hundred miles across the Gulf
and vertical green.
Recurrence of morning.
Here
recognizable night freight.
(It is the strange benefit of geography.)
II.
I found your instructions folded.
Translate encounters magpies
in the sky on the ground
as suddenness.
We have outmapped water.
Steady handed archer
the apple and a new way
to aim.
Dark as our night sky.
Tract of level country
Shantung blue her June of
rain.
Everywhere
vegetables and the smell of their ripeness
unbearable.
And us separate.
Malaria lowland a procession
of equinoxes.
As we saw.
(We of all observers.)
Her house
skid across the flood plain.
Her patterns cut from the Kansas City Star
tulips drawn
for her sister’s Indian Head appliqué.
Take her voice from the two storey house.
See here storms and drizzle
at the bottom of the well.
Out of this what returns?
She sketches charcoal on cotton
as bone, cartilage
or hooves on marshy soil.
Mark the year and adorn
her throat.
Dreams red into knives
and expected
miracles.
Two women move.
Blot out the sky
or honest days in heat.
Single voiced gin
and morning glories.
Nothing more landlocked.
Do we breathe as rain?
They found a bag of asafetida tied around her neck.
A kind of myth pointing upwards. Heavy streeted
religion. She reads of Flemish Masters assumes
a blind canal,
and pronunciation.
Name her Saint. Vistas
and only numbered doors.
There is a smell of cognac and persimmons.
I send you this telegram
this sketch of a woman
cobalt-blue.
J.L Jacob's first book, The Leaves in Her Shoes, was published by Lost Roads Publications.