The Kingdom of the Instant: Poems - Hardcover

Jones, Rodney

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0618224173 ISBN 13: 9780618224173

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002

Synopsis

Many of the poems in Kingdom of the Instant attend to a particular moment — to the individual existing in one place at the time life is lived. Some of them, like “Keeping Time,” are urgent, even ominous (“To be there with it, tock to its tick, mud / to its chink”). In others, the approach to the instant is dilatory, relaxed, as in one of the long poems, “Ten Sighs from a Sabbatical” (“Let loose. Lists into ashes. Tasks into stones”). The poet also addresses natural history and the environment; religiosity, the history and encumbrances of class, regionalism, and the American South; and the act of making poetry. There are homages to a number of masters, ranging from Wallace Stevens to Mississippi John Hurt, but concrete references give way to the fleeting impression, the given moment, the kingdom of the instant that Rodney Jones so strongly evokes. He is, line by line, sound by sound, at the top of his form.

About this title

About the Author

RODNEY JONES is the author of eleven books of poems. His many honors include the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Harper Lee Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award, and he has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. He teaches in the low-residency MFA creative writing program at Warren Wilson College and lives in New Orleans and Southern Illinois.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Keeping Time

To be in there with it, tock to its tick,mud
to its chink, oh, but running, unthinking,
alive, lurid, unprepossessing, liquid,
mercurial, lucky scalpel, leap,
love cry,music sticking from the violin.

I said it, oh, and then it said to me: no
more leaden introspection, have foot
and no boundary, no second choosing,
but this thought here going, too late—
tailwater of its pure, untrammeled flowing.

Downtime looms in the mouths of statues.
Slow time looks back. Change screams,
The docks are all empty, the ships gone away.
In the sea there, bobbing and being immersed.
Why loiter over the petri dish"s bloom?

Why linger? Why why when when wicks
the flesh right off the bone: what
curl and sheen of unbridled delirium takes?
How imagine otherwise lifted and set down,
the solid crock and rabble of other years?

This one here, now, well put: where did I
forget? Where trial gulped its long
meal by drummed and finger-fiddled desks.
Why excavate recite and not compose,
the static fact and not the moving spring?
When did kiss go? When flower power?
Why when when where shows mold-wallows
of hard and tender raptures, gene pools
place held: cinder stones beside a track.
Pick one up and throw it at the train.

The quick and slow go side by side.
What will get the girl to the dance?
Bluster or trudge? And what do you do
with your hands while making love?
The elephant circle? The tour de corps?

The luminous moment continues to grow
freshets of everlastingness, the flow
here unarchived in the only place
life possibles out of unlikelihood,
shrinks from being, leaves only thought.

Snakeskin on the doorsill, reliquary
in which all forms of nudity contrive
when the thing has wriggled on,
grown gigantic beyond losses
and gains: 1967 and 1981. Reckon,

bog down in corrections, or reanimate,
this time with a tad more spice
in the curry, a seven instead of a five.
Drumroll this desk: letters, a map
of the hot fishing spots in the lake

where Richard Nitz, gay-basher,
threw Michael Miley"s axed-off head;
empty cigarette packs; Praise God
I"m Satisfied by Blind Willie Johnson;
and a telephone on top of it all.

But event resists the word. It
happened earlier, a shining thing
among reschedulings and cancellations,
late March, sunlight on daffodils,
the stab wound of "Auld Lang Syne."

Tongue knowledge needs grunt and sigh.
Who need remark much on why
the mating cardinal"s oh mama
brings a snatch of the hesitation blues?
To see two things at once is one thing.

Not genius, work. The night is coming,
sweet hour of prayer. Shall we
bring in the sheaves, gather
at the river? Clone a better sheep?
Here now, need you know the very bird?

Who justifies Little Richard to Beethoven?
The critique of creation is a shriek.
Slow was my downfall, but love
raised me like a lily from the ground.
Long ago, she brought me into round.
A Whisper Fight at the Peck Funeral Home

1
No balm in heaven. Bone light. Things tick as they desiccate.

Immaterial who we were. Time narrows the hide to a strap—
Everything bound leaps once, and is free forever—
decay our fertilizer,
dissolution our daily bread.

Questions. Questions. Rain out there,
between here and the mountain.
Mist for the blind interpreter,
not here yet, maybe never.

But the body gets laid out by noon.
People like to have what is missing before them.

With ashes, you always worry,Are those the right ashes?

Corpse, I want to ask, silent mime,
are you packed?
The Ladies" Junior Auxiliary mans the train station.
What secret did you live out of like a suitcase?

2
Aunt Brenda took the spectacles out of a case
and placed them on the bridge of the nose.
Uncle Howard preferred
the unexpurgated face:

the valves of grief, just barely cocked, venting
a little into the overbearing politeness—

the formal versus the demotic,
the ancient grudge of the elder for the younger,
or Aristotle and Plato
transmuted to a whisper fight,

sounding something like
kopasinkassubuk and hipatenudinsathat,

until I thought to go out
into the hall and thank the undertaker.

3
The Summerfords were there, and the Minters,
friends of a life in the country,
church dinners, weddings, and harvests,
children growing up and going away.

What have I grown up to hate? Some
dishonesty in myself that in others
I could not face.A "scene."A scandal.
The private moment in the public space.

It used to disturb me, at funerals,
most of the people seemed so happy—
the grandnephews grand-funking in the parking lot
and the parlor, full of emcees and raconteurs;
even the widow chuckling
as she dabbed at one eye—

everything part of some vast,
mildly brawling syndicate of hypocrisy.

4
In high school, I would scrawl in the margins of textbooks
parodies of country songs:
"Always an Undertaker,Never a Corpse,"
"The First Word in Funeral Is Fun."
But death is serious. Condolence is the joke.

The undertaker gives permanents.
He takes the bald men"s hats.

Once, when I was a pallbearer at the funeral
of a homicide, I watched
an old man, squint-eyed and sunken-gummed,
lean down and with one
nail-blackened finger probe the putty over the brow
where the bullet had gone in.

At least we don"t hollow them out, wind them with rags,
soak them in tar, then execute their wives and dogs
so they will not have to enter paradise alone.

5
The wisdom stories are so bleak.No strawberries.

One asterisk, from a journal:

June 17, 1994,
the words
of Dr. Eugenia Poulos, she
was about to inject me with lidocaine:

Don"t worry,
I"m a good number.

And another, later that week:

The secondhand word of God
must have been a wise man wisely lying.

He has turned around since dying.

6
What is the poetry of the world?
A wound and poultice.
An eavesdropper"s serenade.
A shrug at Armageddon.
An obsolete love note
addressed to the vengeful cults
of longing and respectability.
Not music, not just music;
more like abandon.
The light of a conservatory
shining in the blueprint of a ruin.

7
Buddy Pittman, the undertaker, told me,
when he was fresh from mortuary school
and still alert to the possibility
of egregious error, he worked
the night shift, alone
among the steel tables,
and one night, nearly daybreak,
a body arrived.

If there was an accident and the doctors had to operate
but knew the patient would not survive,
when they shaved the head for surgery,
they would save the hair
in a manila envelope
to send later to the funeral home.

He told me this, smiling,
with the abiding confidentiality
of one who knows secrets
sometimes leak out into the open air,
and get repeated, but he tells them
anyway, and they end up
on the Internet or in a poem,
for the world leaks.

And the corpse is always a local boy.
Had been celebrating high school
graduation, banana-strawberry daiquiris
fifty miles north,
and coming back, a head-on.
The familiar dry-county mortality.

They go out whole
and come back parts.
And you put them together the best way you can,
consulting as you work
the yearbook of the Tigers, or Devils, or Saints.

Fill in the gaps. Immaterial
what we were. The soul in heaven,
the body on earth. Labor
with putty and brush.Yeats"s metaphor.
Makeup and art. All that work
for one performance and a matinee.

When Eunice came with the flowers—
the deceased was in her son"s class—
she wanted a moment with the body alone.
Buddy must have waited like my students wait
as I read the poem of their life—
verdict, please, not critique. She was
a long time in there. Then said,
"You"ve done a wonderful job,
only Ronnie"s hair was brown, not red."

8
The trick is always minimalism
and understatement, a sham

like civilization—
not the accurate representation

but one"s own interpretation
modified by what one

imagines others expect,
a barely legible death

a paraphrase
of the face

most of the bereaved remember
him wearing into the home.

9
Before these words,
other words filled this page:
the aunt he never saw,
his mother"s twin.

His mother. Dalliance,
encumbrance. A dot
of punctuation in the silent
history of maiden names.

His father married her,
pregnant with their second child,
on condition that she never speak
to her family again.

And that was Grandma Owen,
a vine, as I remember her in her dotage,
putting out the brown flower
of one hand.

Now I want something
that will stand for a man.

10
How strange our vision of another life,
even our own. The real life
storied to oblivion. The legend
nickeled-and-dimed by facts.

The cold eulogy works best, the painting with the fewest strokes,
the record, a verse or two, jokes
if the deceased was old, requiems for the young,
sometimes music, but never anecdotes.

He farmed and the farm got larger:
a natural Calvinist, in all things moderate,
work his middle name, husbandry his byword;
hated Wallace; admired more
than Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson
Adlai Stevenson,
that mild, unelectable man;
as an old man, loved girls, any girl,
modestly, with no trace of debauchery;

had been, in his younger days, a drinker,
a juror at the trial of the Scottsboro Boys.
What works always is silence.Never
imagine any truth desperate to be told.
Easy to love the world more than God.

11
They buried him with his spectacles off.
Closed the lid.Was.
I looked down at him.His or my bones.

I still eat at his table. For years I wore his shoes.

People like to have what is missing before them.

What temper he affected to hold.

He looked in death placid and composed as he had never been in life,
as if he had resumed thinking
the thought he was thinking before he was born.

Copyright © 2002 by Rodney Jones. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0618224173
• ISBN 13: 9780618224173
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 112