The Flag of Imagination Furled
Because we held hands I never prophesied
the tenants of cemeteries nor found time
to solve the great riddles in the narrow
corridors of all my cities. What overcame me, all that
running my forefinger down the wintry pages
of my masters and my adversaries, touching
their sentences like sculptured palaces,
touring their villages of ink? I’m sure most of the time,
Nina Simone was there and helped to deepen
the pouches beneath my eyes even in gleeful Madrid,
preaching to a cloistered community of garlic cloves
or spray-painting morning fog, making sure
not to get too dizzy from the lash of geraniums
lest they launch me into a spell of lyric wonder.
Severe sadness? A cocoon of oppression? Nothing accounts
for my frozen laughter in the proud cantinas,
my meticulous lack of holy clamor as I scribbled
toward some infinitude. How often I’ve wanted to
lick my mirrors and pose questions to my footsteps,
of course without the crisis of caves or politicians
eating hungrily from their dark bowls of pocket watches.Major Jackson is the author
of four collections of poetry,
including Roll Deep (2015),
which won the 2016 Vermont
Book Award and was hailed
in the New York Times Book
Review as “a remixed Odyssey.”
His other volumes include
Holding Company (2010),
Hoops (2006), and Leaving
Saturn (2002), which won the
Cave Canem Poetry Prize and
was a finalist for a National
QIONGHAI PHOTO: PICKER H/FLICKR JACKSON PHOTO: ERIN PATRICE O'BRIEN Book Critics Circle Award.
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