JANE YEH
& HL HIX
JY
On baseball
My mechanics are almost entirely
self-taught.
Hawking and strutting, I hit my
spots.
Nobody talks to me, they are all
afraid.
The nature of perfection is half
fluke, half
Fiction, like the mighty
appaloosa
That haunts the hometown lake.
I'm from one of those states
That never got finished, that
just sort of unravelled, like the sound
Speed makes as it blows right
past you.
*
I was a nibbler, a picker, a
quitter, a rube, whatever
Happened to me happened. I
had no control.
*
HH
Thinking about perfection
as gone before given, given as
something other than itself,
by someone other than the giver,
gives me over
to the stranger who slept with
her head on my shoulder
half the flight, Detroit to
Dublin, overnight,
nineteen-ninety-too-late-to-stop-the-rot-but-too-early-to-know.
To the circle of sunlight
reflected off the watchface
of a woman in a meeting, thus
magnifying on the wall
and ceiling each least gesture of
a wrist I could not see.
As what offers truth but will not
suffer reality.
To the rasp of my steps over
fresh snow loud against
the silence only mountain-town
cold, the loneliness
only three a.m., can make so
otherwise utter.
To the laurel blossoms, months
past now and ever
months ahead, that will overwhelm
even this longest winter.
As what, because it never began,
need not end:
the stranger's mouthing thank
you across the baggage carousel,
my waving at her back as she
walked to passport control.
JY
Passport control
We move through the queues like
well-herded sheep.
The bags under our eyes look like
suspect packages
After a night in coach; by the
airport's early light
We stagger down ramps to be
classified and sorted.
The vast room dwarfs us as if to
make a point.
We inch forward through a maze of
barriers,
Waiting to be inspected. The line
for foreigners
Is always the slowest. We try our
best
To look innocent when the border
guard asks,
What is the length and purpose of
your visit?
I both do and do not belong
here.
Everything I own can be carried
or posted.
Being displaced is like being a
criminal,
Except you haven't done anything
to deserve it.
HH
What Is the Length and Purpose of
Your Visit?
Let home still be home for
others.
As design, this begins with a
gesture. As hope, well...
Spring rose from the roots;
autumn began in the branches.
There were two of us last time.
Last time my favorite word was
"effortless." This time, "spared."
I'm here to learn to dream in
your language.
On walls, the same tags
everywhere, but on boxcars a lexicon.
Nietzsche seeks self-overcoming,
Kierkegaard infinite resignation.
No crocuses yet, just last year's
leaves matted by snowmelt, most way to mud.
Is that security camera named for
what it gives or what it takes away?
Aeschylus could tell a tyrant
from a turnip. Virgil, what the hell.
Missions. Flew a hundred
successful. He. Meaning by "successful" what?
Wait here.
"Effortlessly."
Our last leader showed my
failings as a follower.
I would have waited there had I
known then that I would see what I know now I would have seen if I had stayed.
If I knew my visit's purpose I
would know its length.
JY
Sherlock Holmes on the trail of
the abominable snowman
1. A wrong turnip (taken for a
miscoloured swede)
2. The effortless spill of night,
disrupted
3. Design for a semaphore temple
in semi-Greek marble
4. Textbook occurrence of London
rain: barely
5. Whipping up a dastard-and-goat
soufflé
6. Time for acrobatic
whitewashing of someone's back story
7. Settled how to prune the
epistemological topiary
8. O tempura, O monkeys
9. Himalayan word for mishegoss,
or a type of pasta
10. Behind the scenes at the
prickly ambassador's ball
11. Shoeprint, fishwich,
snowmelt, mismatch
12. Riding the rails to the
lowlands for some jiggery-pokery
13. Who supplied the lurcher with
the faulty parka?
14. Heavily under-represented in
cliff-climbing circles
15. Make way for donkeys
16. The imperceptible wishbone of
the evening dislocated by yowling
17. Off to hell by torchlight and
celluloid sledge runners
18. A frozen crocus laid over a
well-veiled crevasse
19. Camera oblongata
20. After the ice palace rope
bridge two-yak standoff
21. Home: slice of flambéed
haunch in philosophy sauce
22. Towards a general theory of
plonk
23. Whispers (supermoon,
theremin, Sasquatch, postman)
24. Cryptid or goose-chase as
seen through branches
25. Uncertain outcomes predicted
in the secret cattery
HH
Ice Bridge
24. And with what on
their feet?
23. Always the old world we
leave.
22. They made me wait. Apparently
"life-threatening" admits of degree.
21. Out here, back then, you
didn't chop enough wood for this winter, you didn't get the chance to chop for
next.
20. If you think polar means
sealskin and albatross.
19. Disassociation, dese systolic
rhydms, dat shepherd's pie.
18. Topiary yo mama. Topiary my
ass.
17. My new line of cologne. I
call it "weariness."
16. Winter here, colds coldern
snow.
15. It sounded less like a bullet
whizzing by than like a boy making bullet-whizzing-by sounds.
14. Had circumstances been
otherwise. Had she been. Had I.
13. God knows why she believed me
for as long as she did.
12. Undone. U-N-D-O-N-E.
11. They didn't call it an ice
bridge. Or have a concept of "continent." But nothing of theirs
didn't fit on the sledge, Old Father could walk, and there might be seals.
10. In the note, though, he
called the attack "viscous."
9. Heavy machinery, not today,
not any more. A caution's a caution.
8. I know they migrate now,
but what started them?
7. That shepherd's cake eaten and
haven.
6. Rheumatic undergarments,
tubercular toys. Anything smells more like pigeons imploding onto wet cement
than fatigue does, I'd like to know.
5. And a syntax that contested
grammar.
4. Ever pheasant.
3. You got another thing comin.
2. Defy, define, definance.
Deferential calculus.
1. NEVER would have stumbled
those first steps upright, not if she'd foreseen THIS winter. Been just fine on
all fours, hidden in the savannah grass.
Jane Yeh
Jane Yeh was
born in America and educated at Harvard University. She holds master’s degrees
from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Manchester Metropolitan University. Her
first full-length collection, Marabou, was published in 2005 by
Carcanet. It was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award, the Forward Prize
for Best First Collection, and the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize.
Her chapbook, Teen Spies, was published in 2003 by Metre
Editions.
She is the recipient of a New
York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and an Academy of American Poets Prize.
Currently Co-Director of the MA in Creative Writing at Oxford
Brookes University, she also writes for The Times Literary
Supplement, Poetry Review, The Village Voice,
and Time Out New York. She has read from her work at
venues such as the Royal Festival Hall, and at literature festivals
including those in Cheltenham, Edinburgh, and King's Lynn. She lives in
London.
HL Hix
H. L. Hix was born in Oklahoma and raised in various
small towns in the south. After earning his B.A. from Belmont College (now
Belmont University) and his Ph.D. (in philosophy) from the University of Texas,
Hix taught at the Kansas City Art Institute and was an administrator at the
Cleveland Institute of Art, before joining the faculty of the University of
Wyoming, where, after a term as director of the creative writing
MFA, he now teaches. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai University
and the University of Texas, been the “Distinguished Visitor” at the NEO MFA,
and taught in the low-residency MFA at Fairleigh Dickinson University.
His poetry, essays, and other
works have been published in McSweeney’s,Georgia Review, Harvard
Review, Boston Review, Poetry, and other journals,
been recognized with an NEA Fellowship, the Grolier Prize, the T. S. Eliot
Prize, and the Peregrine Smith Award, and been translated into Spanish,
Russian, Urdu, and other languages.