​“Here and There”
 
 
At the edge of blank reverie, there will always
be a field in sunlight, edged by woods, floating
several hills up from home, from the broken sidewalk
and grass of the first toddling footfalls that grew
in a few short years to running bursts across that field.
 
For each of us a field, a stoop, a street, a desert trail,
a box canyon, or concrete, concrete, concrete, a patch
of grass, all various and recognizable, the shaping places
before there was “before,” before we knew the dam
could be built or the dam could burst and our landscapes
would all change, no matter what of them we carried with us.
 
In my field, a brother and father walk alongside.
We are separate and together, each of us
finding our way in the company of the others,
and because of this, I know how to find my way
through uncertainties, no matter how long it takes.
 
 
Jane Creighton’s new book, Bone Skid, Bone Beauty (Saint Julian Press, September 1, 2021), is a stunning — and an almost completely unexpected — addition to the modern poetry bookshelf.  For all practical purposes, this is Creighton’s first book of poetry (her only prior publication — Ceres In an Open Field (Out & Out Books, 1980) — appeared more than forty years ago at a time when Creighton was a very different writer).  Put slightly differently, Bone Skid arrives in our hands with little or no prior warning almost fifty years after Creighton graduated from college.
 
It is well worth the wait.  As our featured poem illustrates, Creighton is a poet of many talents, capable of evoking images with great economy (“the edge of blank reverie”, “the first toddling footfalls”, “the shaping places / before there was “‘before’”), while foreshadowing the pain and disappointment of life and giving us emotional nourishment for the journey.  
 
Here she is in a delicate rhymed sonnet, imagining what it would have been like to be a mother:
 
         It could have gone the other way.  I could
         have said:   “I’ll have this baby,” lifted up
         those heavy breasts — a song to life — and stood
         to thicken in the heat, cursed and cupped
         the pleasing turn of body into bearer
         and helped myself to more of what I thought
         my mother bore.  So now some mornings rarer
         than the moon’s fertile trace, I plot
         elusive breath, a syllable, bare wit
         and other things it might have said, its voice
         skittery in breaking light, the kid
         who’d mirror me, or not.  Alert or coy.
         I might have had a daughter, or a son.
         I might have run my mother’s race, and won.
 
 
“Weight and Measure. 1.”
 
Several of her most successful poems celebrate the lives and personalities of those around her in unexpected ways.  Here, for example, is a dreamscape poem of her deceased father — or is it someone else? — still running the show:
 
 
Though dead, he still directs the funeral.  Always quiet,
he gets his way through suggestion, a gesture,
the tilt of his head.  Before you know it
you find yourself scuttling down his path,
all business, ready to do whatever he says.
 
So here he is, skin and bones, his mouth
a toothless O, lifeless but for these last orders:
Put this box here.  Arrange the folding chairs thus.
Those bowls of daffodils?  Along the windowsill,
a hedge to natural light.
                                       But as the place begins
to fill, he grows anxious and recedes
into the still air behind the Victorian couch
where no one ever goes.  “Too many people,”
says the fading voice.  “Get them out.” . . .
 
 
“Lake Dreams, Annaghmakerrig. 3.”
 
Creighton’s poems sparkle with exquisite bursts of magical description.
 
 
. . . Such is the rocky pasture of early evening.  A mind
just hours ago paddling toward the riverbank path
that leads through pastel fields abundant with a soft
and satisfied wealth, now picks its pace
through a glimmering redness, burnt packages
of ideas that nevertheless court hope
in their rapid demise.
 
 
“My Village.”
 
 
         What will be left of gravity
         and bone once the road this girl walks
         opens skyward?  She’ll skid, vertiginous
         to her toes (how she loves
         that word), and if she floats
         down a steep hill looking up?
         You might, in the deep purple
         jungle of your lungs, breathe out
         a warning just loud enough
         for her not to hear.  Nobody 
         knows the rules. . . .
 
 
“The Woman You Once Will Be.”
 
Lurking in Creighton’s poetry is a sense that people are a bit of a puzzlement for her:
 
 
         Not enough of them in these poems.
         Always a random thought, or animal
         or vegetable, or someone’s elbow shove,
         the sprint around the corner, gone.
 
         Where do they go, these people?
         Why will you not summon them? . . .
         
 
         It’s hard to tell about people, what good
         they will try to do, or what ill.  Or
         what it feels to be one of them,
         to be captive, to be captor.
 
 
“People.”
 
 
         . . . Do not speak to the driver,
         do not even notice him.
         He has his job
         and you have yours:
         You are to look for the in-
         between, borders and edges,
         the postings between this life
         and that, a woman hailing 
         a cab who calls forth, instead,
         a storm of curses
         from a frail and aging woman
         who might be her mother
 
         or yours, renamed as a stranger
         to remind you that no matter
         how well you think you know
         someone, chances are
         she’s holding something back . . . 
 
 
“Lake Dreams, Blue Mountain. 2.”
 
But in the end, it is people — and her love for them — that carries Creighton through:
 
 
         Let me have the love it takes
         to live inside this dream where you
         and you and you and you are walking
         a road.  It leads down to a lake
         I know, banked by granite boulders
         and pine, and I am also with you
         and you and you and you walking
         one by one and together, as if
         we had all, always, been friends
         who loved one another
         in the same place, at the same time.

Reprinted from: https://carlmjenkspoetrycorner.com
 
For Further Reading:  Bone Skid, of course.  (In case you are wondering, Creighton is Professor of English at the University of Houston — Downtown, where she has taught for 24 years.)
 
For Further Watching:  Kirk Lawrence’s delicate reading of our featured poem.   https://youtu.be/w0sUHJsFj9Y

 

 
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“When you welcome the stranger, you welcome Jesus.”  — 
 
The Most Rev. Michael B. Curry
Presiding Bishop and Primate of The Episcopal Church
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Many Americans stretching across our wide political divisions, to the left and right and in the middle, are now welcoming Afghan refugees to America.
 
“Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.” – Hebrews 13:2

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Refugees admitted to the United States for resettlement come through the United States Refugee Admissions Program, or USRAP. The USRAP is an interagency and public-private partnership; Episcopal Migration Ministries is one of the nine national agencies that works in partnership with the US government to resettle refugees.
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