RECENT WORK

all work is copyrighted 2012 by Dale Jacobson

     THE STORY OF OUR LIVES 

I walk along 
the churning river 
and hear the far deep rumors  
of an old tribe, ourselves.

     ANARCHIST SKIES

I saw them march on the campus,
cadets in step, left, right:
"Sound off,
one two."

But crow punches through:
caw! caw! caw!–
and flaps where it wants.

CHANGING THE WORLD

The age moves.

High schemes of névé.

Those glaciers now melting.

How much time can we store in the freezer?



THINKING OF DAVID MARTINSON
IN THE HOSPITAL– HIS LADDERS,
AND A LINE FROM TOM McGRATH


You can't simply say:  Get up.
Walk away from that place.

There is no way to climb beyond gravity.

Those fallen ladders of abandoned homesteads–
"these," you say, “deserve a host of benedictions.”

As do you for saying so.

“Ladders traveling the last road home,”
they become windows losing themselves
in the tall grass, sleeping toward the horizon...

It all happens when we’re not looking.

I don’t know if we know what we are doing
walking this earth.  I would like to know
but I don’t.  There are many who think they do
but I have never trusted them.

Still...  in the stillness, I think of your poems
working their light inside the light, a way
of seeing, and I think how we both
learned from our brother Tom McGrath,
who mentioned “the great open secret,”
which is this:  we are the ones who build
the ladders, rung by rung, day by day,
together:  and the horizons also.