Kansas by Gary Jackson

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend February 25, 2016   Kansas   Gary Jackson

It’s love you left, we’ll say when you never come back for bells for the dead, for the grave stone heads: the only ones that don’t keep count. Don’t we know it’s love that keeps you away, that marks every mile devotion? You would’ve went to the end with each one, made Orpheus turn back. Would’ve fell / would’ve leapt / would’ve left. The living is easy / the leaving is easy / living with ghosts, it was easy to give up your home to your father, struck with the same grief of living, demanding what are you gonna do with my mama’s house? Shorn grass & damp dirt: they’ll put me in the middle. I kick the ground like tires, feeling dumb without flowers / tokens / grief / anything in my hands. You’ll bring me back home, won’t you? Stamp it down, as if the flat earth could answer sometimes this, too, is love. You left.            Copyright © 2016 Gary Jackson. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “Sometimes, to get away from myself and my own grief, I try on my mother’s grief instead, and attempt to answer the question we’re still both constantly asked after all these years: Do you miss home? Do you hate it?” —Gary Jackson   Gary Jackson is the author of Missing You, Metropolis (Graywolf Press, 2010). He teaches at the College of Charleston and lives in Charleston, South Carolina. Poetry by Jackson   Missing You, Metropolis (Graywolf Press, 2010) "Remnants" by Jim Handlin "Alternate Self-Portrait" by Dean Rader "Peaches" by Adrienne Su Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038