Major Jackson - Holding Company

Also by Major Jackson Hoops Leaving Saturn Major Jackson Adjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help to preserve line breaks. Copyright 2010 by Major Jackson All rights reserved First Edition Excerpt from T. S. Eliot from Collected Poems by Robert Lowell. Copyright 2003 by Harriet Lowell and Sheridan Lowell.

Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Excerpt from Plan of Future Works from Poems by Pier Paolo Pasolini, translated by Norman MacAfee. Translation copyright 1982 by Norman MacAfee. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W.

Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact W. W. Norton Special Sales at specialsales@wwnorton.com or 800-233-4830 Book design by Charlotte Staub Production manager: Anna Oler The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Jackson, Major, 1968 Holding company / Major Jackson. 1st ed. p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-393-07080-4 (hardcover) I. Title. PS3610.A354H65 2010 811'.6dc22 2010017728 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 10110 www.wwnorton.com W. W. W.

Norton & Company Ltd. Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT ISBN 978-1-324-00415-8 (ebook) For James Welden Romare Jackson and in memory of my mother Gloria Ann Matthews Contents Acknowledgments Grateful acknowledgment is made to editors of the following publications, anthologies, and Web sites in which some of these poems originally appeared: AGNI , The American Poetry Review , Ashville Poetry Review , Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry , The Cortland Review , Ecotone , failbetter.com, Fence , From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great , Luna: A Journal of Poetry and Translation , Harvard Review , jubilat , Memorius 10 , New Orleans Review , Northwest Review , The Paris Review , Ploughshares , A Public Space , Sugar House Review , Quarterly West , The Queen City Review , Tuesday Journal , and Zoland Poetry 3 . It is a pleasure to thank the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence Program at Baruch College for time and resources to complete this manuscript. I thank my colleagues at the University of Vermont, New York University, and Bennington Writing Seminars for inspiration. I am also ever grateful for dear compatriots, friends, and family who support and hold dear my company. one muse, one music, had one the luck lost in the dark night of the brilliant talkers. one muse, one music, had one the luck lost in the dark night of the brilliant talkers.

Robert Lowell, on T. S. Eliot Then once those expressionistic candles have been lit at the altars of sex, Ill return to religion. . . and finally Ill reveal my true passion: Which is life raging [or unwilling] [or dying] and thus, again poetry: neither the sign nor the existing thing matters . and finally Ill reveal my true passion: Which is life raging [or unwilling] [or dying] and thus, again poetry: neither the sign nor the existing thing matters .

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Plan of Future Works Holding
Company For I was born, too, in the stunted winter of History. For I, too, desired the Lions mouth split & the world that is not ours, and the wounded children set free to their turnstiles of wonder. I, too, have blinked speechless at the valleys of corpses, wished Scriabins Black Mass in the Executioners ear, Ellington in the Interrogation Room. I now seek gardens where bodies have their will, where the self is a compass point given to the lost. Let me call your name; the ground here is soft & broken. I gave the bathtub purity and honor, and the sky noctilucent clouds, and the kingfisher his implacable devotees.

I gave salt & pepper the table, and the fist its wish for bloom, and the net, knotholes of emptiness. I gave the loaf its slope of integrity, the countertop belief in the horizon, and mud its defeated boots. I gave morning triumphant songs which consume my pen, and death its grief which is like a midsummer thunderclap. But I did not give her my tomblike woe though it trembled from my white bones and shook the walls of our home. As if one day, a grand gesture of the mind, an expired subscription to silence, a decision raw as a concert of habaneros on the lips, a renewal to decency like a trash can smashing a storefront or shattering the glass face of a time clock: where once a man forced to the ground, a woman spread-eagled against a wall, where a blast into the back of an unarmed teen: finally, a decisive spark, the engine of action, a civilian standoff: on one side, a barricade of shields, helmets, batons, and pepper spray: on the other, a cocktail of fire, all that is just and good. As it happened, I was twirling a cauliflower floret, lost in Lewiss wardrobe of pallid trees, considering my countrys longing for homogenized milk & bags of tube socks from Walmart, which felt cancerous.

What came to me like a surprise snowfall in the soft evening of a snow globe, one has to pinch salt and sprinkle in the palm, repeatedly, especially when the temperature in mothers trailer has begun to drop. In this way, after your Constitution fades, youve your own hourglass and no one else to blame. To the question of historys tectonic drift, Immanuel Velikovsky removed his glasses & pinched his temples before a silent throng at the Royal Hypnagogic Society in Edmonton. Through a window, coppiced trees blurred. An orange-headed thrush fleetingly invaded his sight. Someone coughed.

Despair fell into despair, building its music. The abrupt clash of meaning was like the laughter of running children. He saw the microphones convexed portals as one of many recognizable texts out of our celestial holes. That summer, municipality was on everyones lips, even the earth eaters who put the pastor in pastoral. Truth is my zeal for chicory waned, and my chest was damp. I shivered by a flagpole, knowing betrayal was coming my way.

Just the same, I believed like a guitar string believes in distance and addressed each bright star Lord of My Feet . A country of overnight deputies, everyone had a knot to endeavor. I read oaks and poplars for signs: charred branches, tobacco leaves strung up to die, swamp soil in my soul. Ever trace the outline of a phantom mob, even if you were late arriving? The screens fabrications remain. A film shot never fails, sailing through the century like a black V at the hour of moaning. I premiere these pontifical birds: villagers march and raise their arms, Marschlieder .

Thus I am your sweet messenger glittering more than first stars, a harvest of light concealing your nicks and little deaths. My comrade, my camera, my power, my fury, my triumph, my will: do you not also, my love, flicker in a cathedral of terror? I live on the roof of the world among the aerial simulacra of Things, among the faded: old tennis shoes, vanished baseballs, heartbreak gritted with dirt. My mind flickers like lightning in a cloud. Im networked beholding electric wires and church spires. I lean forward and peer at the suffering below Sartre said: man is condemned to be free. I believe in the dead who claim to believe in me says, too, the missing and forgotten.

Day darkens on. I hear our prayers rising. I sing to you, now. Hotels take up where bedrooms leave off. Crucifixes find their way above senate bills. A one-sided temper precedes a major pact.