Major Jackson > Quotes

“. . . poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise. This is poetry's social value.”
― Major Jackson

“ll we want is to succumb to a single kiss
that will contain us like a marathon
with no finish line, and if so, that we land
like newspapers before sunrise, halcyon
mornings arrived like blue martinis. I am
learning the steps to a foreign song: her mind was torpedo, and her body was storm,
a kind of Wow. All we want is a metropolis
of Sundays, an empire of hand-holding
and park benches? She says, "Leave it all up to me.”
― Major Jackson, Holding Company: Poems

“Designer Kisses"

I’m glum about your sportive flesh in the empire of blab,
and the latest guy running his trendy tongue like a tantalizing surge
over your molars, how droll. Love by a graveyard is redundant,
but the skin is an obstacle course like Miami where we are
inescapably consigned: tourists keeping the views new.
What as yet we desire, our own fonts of adoration. By morning,
we’re laid out like liquid timepieces, each other’s exercise in perpetual
enchantment, for there is that beach in us that is untranslatable; footprints
abound. I understand: you’re at a clothes rack at Saks
lifting a white linen blouse at tear’s edge wondering.”
― Major Jackson, Holding Company: Poems

“Aubade"

Beyond the limits of myself, there is you, a wind-wave
of fading light on a square of cottage pane,
a final mix of golden prairie in my mind.
I am the impoverished heir of blackened gum quarters,
your crosswalk & roofline of foul pigeons. Dear Sibilant Stir & Kick:
see that tall grass on the ceiling, that burst of dusted corn,
that sky advancing its phalanx of irritable clouds?
I rest my hand on your thigh beneath its silk chemise,
so like a mid-surge surf of turquoise sky stilled.
Whichever way your shoulder moves, there's joy.”
― Major Jackson, Holding Company: Poems

“It's too bad war makes people
disappear like chess pieces, and that prisons
turn prisoners into movie endings.”
― Major Jackson