An English Professor at Erie Community College in Buffalo, NY, and a co-editor of the feminist literary collective Earth’s Daughters, Jennifer Campbell has recently had over fifty poems published in journals such as Slant, Slipstream, Rockhurst Review, Caesura, HeartLodge, Nerve Cowboy, Letterhead, Not Just Air, Circle Show, and the Canadian journal PRECIPICe, and work is forthcoming from Eclipse and Louisiana Literature. Her first book-length collection of poems, entitled Driving Straight Through, was published by FootHills in 2008.

Visiting Ruins

                      “In the name of Zeus!  Of what use
are words when one’s in love?”
—Nikiphoros Vrettakos

The colored birds of Companionship and Desire

set out one year ago, searching for the world’s

center point, on which they might alight.  Today

they collide atop the navel of the world.

 

Your Delphic hands cause rockslides, your eyes

father earthquakes.  I ease into the Sacred Way

of your temple, barefoot and marble-smooth.

I am no Zeus, you no mere mortal.  The more

 

you give, the less that remains, yet you willingly

crumble into my cupped hands.  Then you spread

oracles, seeds into my future, possibility

sprouting from stone.  Long after becoming ruins,

 

a study in art and torment, I will discover your

core, find it smoldering, vital, within mine.
 

Worry Dolls

I can’t sleep some nights with so many

stacked under my pillow, propping my neck

in uncomfortable angles.  There’s one for you, Lisa,

and your matter-of-fact answer: mini-strokes

or a tumor.  It must have frightened you,

vision failing one day, but I imagine

you rushed home anyway to fix the family dinner

with peripheral sight.  One for you, Becky,

and your sabotage of seven sober months.

What did you think about as you flew down Main Street

drunk, playing chicken with police on the eve

of your sentencing?  Tonight, you all become the dolls,

dream wires wound with bits of yarn, linked by hand

in a colorful chain—gather your hot, silvery fear

into one wand, and I will anoint you with light—

the women who never see it coming, who barrel

through blackness, straight toward disaster.

Muñeca, sweet green and orange beauty, lined beside

a purple-blue sister, peel open your heavy, heavy eyes

and focus upon hope, one night at a time.
 

Georgia

She doesn’t second-guess.

Peering through windows, neighbors

note the impossible, Grinch-like heaps

of empties, flowerpots, firewood,

tracing the high ceiling of her dilapidated

mansion.  Curls of paint drop to the floor

in piles of forgotten finishing school etiquette,

tarnished dessert spoons indecently drape over

steak knives in the sink.  The townspeople

choose to ignore the lingering smoke

and respect her right to gather crap, leave

the house in torn jeans and chat up the man

at the nursery about Keats while she buys

far more flowers than she can plant.  Back inside,

it’s a symphony, really, the sound forty cats

make crashing down the halls, some with cans

stuck on their heads.  They say it’s a wonder

how someone so brilliant and well-read

lies all day in bed when good firewood

is expecting to be invited inside.
 

Artistic License

–upon having poems rejected by a journal   

You can reject

my poems before

the ink dries—

that won’t change

the fact I ruined Eliot

for you, disproved your

theory of a scared prude.

Fourteen thousand

attended his lecture in

a Minneapolis ballpark,

to hear him argue

the stuff of poetry

(that is, emotion) must

be created, not merely

felt.  He wasn’t hiding

behind Prufrock; he was

refining the insecurity,

sloppy pain we all feel.

 

You can refuse

to imagine Van Gogh’s

Irises, but I’ve proven

his sanity by these

very flowers and their

uncharacteristic precision.

His ghost isn’t haunting

galleries, rewriting

artist’s statements—

he is dead, on his own terms,

leaving Gauguin to inhabit

yellow chairs, doubt

his own superiority.

 

And you can try

(like Ginsberg did)

to make Walt gay, but after

holding hands with Allen

in a neon supermarket,

Whitman had a hot date

with a young widow

under cubist clouds and

 

a notoriously starry sky,

Degas’ dancer perched on

on his tiny ceramic fingertip.
 

Ostensibly

—On Frost’s tombstone:
“I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”

An exquisite sand cherry,

close-up, perforated wildly

by the greedy bites of beetles.

When I fill the sugar bowl, crystals

pool in tiny cones on the counter.

At times you reach for my hand

before your mind thinks to stop you;

skin pierced like a warm macintosh,

you enter me with languid desire.

Holly berries are brightest red

in late August, unaware

of their unseasonable rigidity,

all at the same house, same life.

Only different scents mark time passing.

The proud fern hiding its yellow leaves,

dying from inside out.
 

Last Touch

–after Dorianne Laux’s “Her First”   

It won’t be her first death, but you

will be her first man.  She will smooth

down her scrubs, consider how to lower

your eyelids, close the shades on a man

never this exposed.  Not quite those of a father,

there is something familiar about your

rough thumbs and uneven cuticles, the skin

on your chest far softer than hers.

 

She will imagine that one night your hand

reached out, guided a woman’s doubt

into that warm palm, and led her through

a crowded concert, the drums hammering,

changing the rhythm of your taxed heart.

She’ll sense that you made this woman whole,

filled in her shallows like heavy, welcome rain.

 

And hesitate when placing the pad

of an index finger atop eyelids

that never stopped seeing, never allowed

total repose, just stood watch

over lovers and friends.

Locking the speculation inward,

eternally, she’ll never forget how long

it took the warmth to hand over your body.