Kansas by Gary Jackson

Kansas
Gary Jackson

It’s love you left, we’ll say
when you never come back
for bells for the dead, for the grave
stone heads: the only ones
that don’t keep count. Don’t
we know it’s love that keeps you
away, that marks every mile
devotion? You would’ve went
to the end with each one,
made Orpheus turn back.
Would’ve fell / would’ve leapt /
would’ve left. The living is easy
/ the leaving is easy / living
with ghosts, it was easy
to give up your home
to your father, struck
with the same grief
of living, demanding
what are you gonna do
with my mama’s house?
Shorn grass & damp dirt:
they’ll put me in the middle.
I kick the ground like tires,
feeling dumb without flowers /
tokens / grief / anything
in my hands. You’ll bring me
back home, won’t you? Stamp
it down, as if the flat earth
could answer sometimes this,
too, is love. You left.

SELECTED BY OLIVER DE LA PAZ

Gary’s work has always been resonant for me, not only because of his interest in comics, comic book hero universes, and what to me feels like a yearning or a search for community. And in this poem, “Kansas,” I’m reminded of my own upbringing in a small town in Eastern Oregon. Here, Jackson’s speaker declares “Don’t/we know it’s love that keeps you/away . . . ” and I think about my own past, growing up wondering what’s beyond and absolutely needing to leave the place that had raised me. Jackson names it–not returning to honor those whose graves may be still and present in the place abandoned, and so I’m struck by the syntactical hesitations that occur:

          I kick the ground like tires,
          feeling dumb without flowers /
          tokens / grief / anything
          in my hands. You’ll bring me
          back home, won’t you? Stamp
          it down, as if the flat earth
          could answer sometimes this,
          too, is love. You left.

The forward slashes functioning like linebreaks which offer pauses in the linebreak’s traditional sense, but the visual isolation of “grief” amidst the two linebreaks names the thing the speaker is feeling, followed by words from beyond: “You’ll bring me/ back home, won’t you?” And the last line is full of halting speech.

ABOUT OLIVER DE LA PAZ

Oliver de la Paz is the author and editor of several books. His most recent book, The Diaspora Sonnets (Liveright Press 2023) was the winner of the New England Book Award, the Julie Ward Howe Award, and was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award. He teaches at the College of the Holy Cross where he is the James N. and Sally L. O’Reilly Barrett Professor in Creative Writing and he serves as the Worcester, Massachusetts Poet Laureate.