across the page long as a look of love.
which is to say I’m feeling Eastern.
which we stash in silent mumblings.
yet hear still the dead of my own house.
No one cares that I count your eyeblinks.
No one cares about all this hard water.
and I quicken inside your name.
like a softly closing door.
they bend under its weight.
is just sampling the sound of the rain.
each finger erupting a new continent.
he is lifting only his blackness.
in staccato: dee dee dee, dee dee dee.
in the milky evening light.
Major Jackson is the author of four books, most recently Roll Deep (W. W. Norton, 2015). He teaches at the University of Vermont.
Didi Jackson's poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Green Mountains Review, The Common, Water~Stone Review, and Passages North, among other publications. Her chapbook Slag and Fortune was published by Floating Wolf Quarterly in 2013. She lives in South Burlington, Vermont, where she teaches Poetry and the Visual Arts and Creative Writing at the University of Vermont.