Jeff Baker

 

Please, not so soon. For now let me be
simplified—no face, just a dull push
of electricity descending the spine.
What if I wake tomorrow to geese
formationed for descent, or waddling
out onto broken ice—or to robins
with breasts like something gnawed open,
pestering the ground for worms?
How could the plates of my skull hold
together if the fractalizations
of ice melted and broke and rode
back into the trees? if the chemical
green fire lit up again in the grass?
if the velocity of misspelling accelerated
in the suturing of genes? Since I am welded
so tightly to zero, tomorrow no cardinals
like ingots of blood in the branchings,
no molecules of piss unlocking their stink
in the alleys, no dogwoods thrusting
their cups of nail holes in my face, no one waving
a gun on a day so beautiful you
had forgotten the knife at the throat
of simplest comprehension. Before that,
leave me this featureless sleep
a while longer. Let me be made stupider
than humanly possible, or let me wake
to more winter, where a few offcast bottles
tumor a bare and birdless thicket.

 

Jeff Baker grew up in the mountains of East Tennessee in a place called Smokey Branch. His writing has benefited from the insights of brilliant friends and mentors at Tennessee Tech (B.S.) and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (M.F.A.). His poems have appeared widely in journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Washington Square, and Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VI: Tennessee. Whoop & Shush, his debut book, was chosen by Dorianne Laux for the Idaho Prize for Poetry and is available from the University of Washington Press.

This is an earlier version of the poem. It appears in final form in his collection Whoop & Shoosh.