Jordan Smith: Parts of the Same Project,

He thought, as he dropped the needle
On the Highwoods String Band lp
And looked at the photo on the jacket,
The musicians out standing in jeans and flannel
And western hats in their field that might
As well have been their song as the set
Ended and all the dancers went back
To the land or their second floor
Apartments, like his on North Charles,
And he went back to the second-hand
Royal typewriter on the round oak table
He got for free covered by a thin Indian
Paisley print on which he’d strewn
The Tao, Some Trees, The Pleasure
Of the Text, The Opening of the Field,
Just to have them handy, and a stack
Of yellow second sheets that wasn’t
Dwindling fast enough, and a legal pad
With the draft of a poem going nowhere
No matter what he changed, so
He tried imagining the empty page
On the machine’s spindle as the opening
Of a foreign film at a college screening,
The crackling, scratched, streaked leader,
Then the Janus logo, and then, as if he’d dozed
Through the opening scenes and startled
Awake to a language he didn’t know,
A woman by a window, her silhouette
Between light crossing a meadow
And the projector’s lamp, and he understood
That if he spoke she would vanish,
And if he didn’t she would vanish, since
The words coming to him now were a path
She gestured towards into the high
Woods, and to utter them was to enter
A music that only seemed too simple
To be simply his own.

~~~~

Copyright 2025 Jordan Smith

Jordan Smith’s many books include Little Black Train, winner of the 2019 Three Mile Harbor Press Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, and Salmagundi.