I have always admired how Jay Thompson’s poems approach meaning by backing away from it, inhabiting that paradox of quantum observation, that one’s gaze affects reality. In this excerpt from Winter, it is not the superfice, but the essence that is mutable: “day to day only essences change”. A counter-intuitive statement, which perhaps makes more sense if one conflates appearance with essence in an act of reduction, a refusal of the platonic, an offering of respect for each individual thing. Jay Thompson’s metaphysics is not that of Robert Hass, where “each particular erases / the luminous clarity of a general idea,” where the presence of something unique is a “tragic falling off from a first world / of undivided light.” In Thompson’s conception, there are as many essences as there are things and so the act of observation takes on a kind of sacred eros: “how long / since looking on a thing felt / like a perfection of desire”. Thompson refuses to master the things he observes, to subjugate them to meaning. And yet, we are met with phrases like “unborn factory pigs,” “the sunset’s medical bankruptcy,” and “paper blood,” which complicate these poems. They are half-seen intrusions from a world of political and social consciousness, but they do not impose meaning on the observational subjects of his poems. Rather, they reveal that even a choice as small as the poet’s when he chooses what to observe, be it his toddler or the tree out his window, has grand implications for our fraught lives.
Five poems from Winter
unborn factory pigs
queue at the gates of life
a thin moon sees
my toddler talk to his sister
the spider
my bitter and shiftless spirit came
before the bad world
*
another November I still
haven’t learned the tree out
my window’s name
its achey
paint-well yellow how long
since looking on a thing felt
like a perfection of desire
*
day to day only essences change
this is the same homey tone of skin
same plain-blown blossoms
I’ve been living
where voluptuous weeds
bloom to swallow the money
and stunt the white-collar skill set
*
Mark I’m not coming downstairs
but I love you and agree to
debase myself and my sense of time
the billboard deadheads its basil brother
the sunset’s medical bankruptcy
forgets my conscientious
spending of paper blood
*
he asks who killed me but I stay silent
my child’s child’s child
alert in the mulberry and shelves of coral
frightens me
his small laughter makes me sick
you’re waiting for me to make this a story about mastery and meaning
but I won’t
______________________
Jay Thompson teaches poetry to women incarcerated at King County Jail, co-edits the journal Thermos, and plays guitar in Princess Seismograph. He keeps a blog at .
