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.
About this poem
“Sometimes, to get away from myself and my own grief, I try on my mother’s grief instead and attempt to answer the question we’re still both constantly asked after all these years: Do you miss home? Do you hate it?” – Gary Jackson
About Gary Jackson
Gary Jackson is the author of “Missing You, Metropolis” (Graywolf Press, 2010). He teaches at the College of Charleston and lives in Charleston, S.C.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
(c) 2016 Gary Jackson. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
