Jessica Jopp

In response to a student who told me he just “skims” the poetry right before class The barn was in the Netherlands, in a field where fierce night wind caught the straw as if to fuse the winter stars to their coldness. A farmer, woken by the sound, knowing his animals would be agitated, walked to the barn and by lantern brushed the tails of his horses. In calming them he gathered many long, gleaming strands of their nut-brown hair. Given over to what he heard in the swishing of their tails— the lash, the taut string of grief, turned slow, persistence turned to rhythmic movement— he hoped that if he listened long enough the layered sound would become a salve. He rolled the strands together, laid out along the windowsills of the barn. Then, once dry enough in spring, he rolled them in paraffin wax to preserve the sound and left them to absorb all the varied rays of sun, the spills of rain, and then snow flying fast across the latched windows and the slats, the rhythm of other breathing, animals plodding by the barn walls. The wax melted as the years progressed and other horses resided in the stalls, and their tail strands were added to the aging threads.  From that encased sound deepening over years, a rope, pulled strong and taut, would resonate. Then another generation worked the land and waxed the horse-tail cord again, and in turn when it caught that century’s light, was spun into amber. Woven into the cells of hair: the tones of canal and field, pasture, furrows of plough, leaf and shadow, straw and stone, the human calling, the animal uttering. And when melted again, incrementally strands from other horses living there were added until there were enough layers of sound, set with the nourishment of grass and salt, to be given away and the space the hair had occupied would be returned to emptiness. The horse-hair cord was brought by a farmer to a luthier’s shop along a canal, and it was a perfect fit, she said, for a violin bow she had carved a few months earlier, waiting, and for the bow-less violin someone had just given her.  She knew rosin carrying a current through pastures, filled thirst, and the grief of night wind and scavenged apples made the gathered pieces a whole. And now they are together in your hands this moment to make unrehearsed, immediate, after all those animals’ years, when you bring the instrument to your chin, when you raise the hair-strung bow, again their elemental sounding, and then their measured note, their first.

The newspaper caption read: “Two officers talk to a young man, name withheld, as he stands on a bridge above the Merrimack River, distraught over learning that his mother is terminally ill.” When I first saw you I could glance up from your image in the paper and out her kitchen doorway watch my mother trim her artemisia, scraps of silver trailing her green wheelbarrow. And I imagined yes, if mine were dying, I would be on the abutment too, about to release the cable ignoring those attempting rescue

The Oldest Love Poem (For Susan) Back from Istanbul, she gives to me the photograph she took inside the Archaeological Museum’s blue tiled hush, of a tablet carved in terra cotta from Nippur, written in Sumerian. Delicate etches, a lift of riverbed where the summer waters ran glistened on this piece of earth the earnest working hand, a pause between the lines to contemplate cedars’ ornate overhanging leaf-work become inseparable from the carving.  Maybe reading sky, reading wind, or tree sounds beside the sound of clay shaped to carry a human mark. Maybe it says we are so elegant in our exchange that looking at each other the trees whisper their contented green across any distance to be here branches heat-satiated full in our veins of holding