Every Place Is Home to Someone
This finalist for the New Poets Prize—also poet laureate for Hattiesburg, Mississippi—takes us on intricate tours of Saturday in a small town, the thin line between redemption and judgment, and how beauty and love unfold in everyday moments.
poems from Mississippi. Salvation South New Poets Prize.
ROCKHOUNDING
A host of mud-splashed ATVs
and shouting kids. Rope swing, beer can,
a blow-up raft, a pack ’n’ play
all clustered where the highway
casts a stripe of shade across the river.
This is Saturday I guess
in small town, Mississippi.
I remember driving south on highways,
watching towns bleed
one into the next. Sick emptiness
of the epiphany that every place,
however strange, is home to someone.
From a car I’ve peered
over a bridge like this, down
to a river beach and thought,
Someone might sit there in the sun.
But highways river us along.
Today, like an explorer
spurred by curiosity and tales
of treasure, I’ve ventured to the wilderness
northwest of town. Brought my car to shore
on the slumped shoulder of a highway.
Dragged the camp chairs, cooler,
and two sunscreened children down this muddy
trail out to the Bouie river’s beach.
And like those European voyagers, I’m startled
to find not an untouched wild, but culture
and myself the foreigner.
Underfoot the beach
is a great gathering of rocks.
It’s what I’ve come to see,
what mineral curiosity
has washed up here.
We search for fossils, arrowheads.
For something glacier-scraped
from northern soil and tumbled
south on ancient rivers;
something born of gases
trapped in liquid rock once spewed
from the fiery mountain that now sleeps
under our capital. A stone—a solid token
of how Jackson sits on a volcano’s throat
and our state history plays out
like dreams above the silent
mountain’s head. Water and wind
erode host rock until at last
an agate loosens and rolls free. Free
to be washed and pebbled in this stream.
I think of people, swept and tumbling
from one country to another.
Routed by cold forces—
famine, violence, or like me, moved
by threat of poverty. My children
float and splash like otters, and I let them drift
to where the other swimmers are.
I notice in my thoughts I said
“our capital,” “our history.”
Today we find a few good rocks.
An agate, striated and swirled,
becomes a crude map of what formed it
as if the currents it rode
diagrammed themselves across
its surface. How a place or way of being
strangely comes over us, first slow
then quick. I think about the peaches
I’ve been keeping on the kitchen counter
clothespinned in a paper bag, rock hard
until the day we’ll have to eat them
fast over the sink with sunlight
racing down our wrists.
I take another pebble from the beach
and rinse it bright. Journeysmooth
should be a word we use.
I throw the rock back in and watch
the water heal.
poems from Mississippi. Salvation South New Poets Prize.
REDEMPTION, DAY THIRTY
Naamah stopped counting.
That day she let the nub of charcoal
drop with a light
crack against the bench,
and made no further mark.
She gazed over the animals,
then fastened on the gray dove,
smooth and small.
Noah was little company
after the foal. And she would need
someone to talk to.
Early days
the dove hid above a cedar beam,
high in the makeshift forest canopy
where wide-winged blue macaws
eclipsed her. But Naamah saw
and always left a little grain
below her roost. At last
the bird lit down to the rough floor.
And Naamah spoke in low tones,
wooed her with a blade of silver grass
to step onto her wrist. Then,
with a trail of millet up her sleeve,
she coaxed the dove onto her shoulder
where it perched all afternoon,
stayed while she spread fresh straw
for the rhinoceros and mucked
the oryx stall. Stayed
while the days grew still
and drifted like a pond leaf,
while the ark’s small windows filled
with sun and then with crystal-studded
blue again. On quiet afternoons,
Naamah looked out at endless water
doubling endless sky
and wondered to the bird, Why
have we been spared? Or is this ark
a judgment? When the mirror-earth
looked solid like a winter lake,
she thought of the highlands,
and how much higher
were they now? She’d dreamed,
before all this, of wings
and rising tall above the tallest
trees. She’d loved the solitude
and quiet shade inside the barn
which seemed back then so like a ship
skimming the gold field. She remembered
how sometimes she’d wished
never to leave.
poems from Mississippi. Salvation South New Poets Prize.
PRESENT
not a memafter “Absences” by Donald Justice
not a mem em Not snowfall,
not a memory of descending notes
brushed on a childhood piano,
damped and remote.
I have the slap and sizzle
of another August rainstorm
and two live children kept indoors.
not mI have thunderous feet on stairs
not a memand rough, run-by glissando
not a on the ivory, the door-
bell chime and anxious dog
not a and nothing like those
aching absences that breed clean,
silent ennui.
not a Lilies in a pitcher
blare and stain themselves
gold. The table holds their wreck of petals,
and more buds crescendo every day.
poems from Mississippi. Salvation South New Poets Prize.
Ode
I was trbeginning with a line by Richard Brautigan
I was trying to describe you
to someone the other day. I couldn’t
say you look like any other person
so I said you’re tall,
wear glasses. Although
sometimes you don’t
while driving, when you really should.
And when you shouldn’t—
in the ocean surf or on a tennis court—
you always do.
Before we said out loud
our vows, I dreamed
of taking off your glasses
though I didn’t say this then,
or later to the person asking
your description. I didn’t mention
how your skin looks
wet with surf
or how your entering a room
is like the first cool day of autumn;
how you hold a thought
behind your eyes
while reading, and a stillness
settles on your body,
makes a person want
to follow where the book
has taken you. I’d leave the movie theater
where Richard Brautigan and I watch
electricity first blink its light over America.
I’d paddle time’s dark-blue Atlantic,
find the brasserie where you sit
drinking with your Paris Communards.
I’d touch your arm and watch you
come back to our room
turned like a leaf. I’d see the mind
behind your wire rims
arrive fresh. You
that moment most resembling
the thing you most look like to me:
sunlight across a page,
the page freighted with silent, steady-
shouldered symbols ready to be read.
Jennifer Peterson's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming inThe Threepenny Review,Colorado Review,Radar,Beloit Poetry Journal,Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, Mississippi and serves as the inaugural poet laureate of the city of Hattiesburg. She is the author of a poetry chapbook,Must Resemble Leisure, published by Seven Kitchens Press.