Jared Smith is the author of thirteen volumes of poetry. His work has appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies here and abroad. He is Poetry Editor of Turtle Island Quarterly (e-zine,) and has worked on the editorial staff of The New York Quarterly, Home Planet News, and The Pedestal Magazine, as well as serving on the Boards of literary and arts non-profits in New York, Illinois, and Colorado. He is a former Special Appointee at Argonne National Lab, and past advisor to several White House Commissions under President William Clinton. He lives in Lafayette, Colorado.
Poems
He Does What It Takes
Curling his fingers around porcelain
he cradles the morning cup of coffee and watches
steam rise between his fingers, how each finger
shapes the fog of morning with his unique mark,
his DNA and his fingerprints upon the swirl of time,
and he listens to the tick of the clock upon his wall,
the first birds beginning to sing in his garden,
and a dog startled by dawn down the street,
the morning paper hitting with a thud at his door.
This is what the man is before he goes out
to turn the ignition in his family car. It is what
his wife thought of before she thought of diamonds
and before there were other souls beneath this roof.
It is the little things that make the man what he is,
the scent of his chemical balances, the colors he sees
as sun rises over the blasted buildings of his city,
the tiniest bits of the universe that have come to him
and pulled together to be unique in all of time.
This is what he is, and he goes out each morning
to do what the machine asks and comes back each night.
At night the crickets are calling to the darkness and light
within him, and the hum of commerce fills his veins.
He whispers of love with each breath he takes.
From the book Shadows Within the Roaring Fork (OR: Flowstone Press, 2017)
What We Don’t Talk Of
Our language is one forged from
fists slammed down on desks,
from Teutonic storage bins forged
from fire for cold steel weaponry.
It is a scaffolding for science
measured and contained too small;
a brittle thing matching the metal
that places fences in our pockets.
Our language does not understand
nor have words for sunrise coating
and enmeshing autumn grains
growing where water meets the land.
It does not understand the lightness
filling the dark between trees at night.
The wind moves between its words
as though they were but dried shells.
Our language but mimics the eyes
of fox stealing the eggs from chicks
or taking meat home for the pups.
Our syllables get caught in its fur
and brushed out by brambles
scattered to fleshless tangles of rage.
Our language is one of frustration,
unable and unwilling to be flexible,
unwilling to listen to the words
of welcome that come from your lips,
unwilling to forgive what it does not know.
From To The Dark Angels (New York Quarterly Books, 2015)
Shadows Within The Roaring Fork
The river looks the same as it did
an hour ago, this river that is not a big river
but one you could jump halfway over
one sage brush bank to the other almost,
nothing like the Big Muddy or even The Hudson,
not The Colorado even but still
with the sun hitting down upon its rapids
and spring flush rolling boulders downstream,
with the few shade trees above it in wind
it looks the same river it was yesterday,
a singular presence, an eel chasing its tail
under salt-slicked roadways and arches.
But this is the time of year when most
it changes and the insects hatched upon its surface
are swirled down and kegs of stone roll along
its bed and the minerals giving it its colors
seep into its passage, the fox that dipped its paws,
the bear way upstream that dragged across it
washing the heavy musk of winter in its spume,
have all been taken in its solvent, been drunken deeply
and washed away tasting as nothing but water
in this clearest of mountain rivers erasing it seems
everything and taking it all away within it,
ever changing and taking everything down,
each hoof print, each piece of whitened skull,
each reflection of the moon and the stars,
though it looks the same as it always did.
From far above one day into the next the same,
from up close pressed against your lips, drawn in
from one day into the next it tastes the same purity
of snow that inhabits the highest mountains
having taken all the dust and debris to itself,
roaring that old adage that nothing lasts forever
and even the continents will be washed away.
And perhaps it’s so, perhaps the weight
of so many years and souls and dreams
will wash down with the rusted nails
and the broken concrete shells of men,
but entering into that river there are shapes,
are shadows lurking, holding their own
finning the graveling beds, watching,
taking all that debris inside and breathing,
moving independent of the current,|
causing change and setting red suns to burn
in places men have not yet gone nor seen.
And these elusive shadows, they change the river as well
filling its waters with the scent and sense of life.
From Shadows Within The Roaring Fork (OR: Flowstone Press, 2017)
Soaring on the Tectonic Waves of Time
A hawk folds itself into the updrafts atop Green Mountain,
its eyes now a part of the wind and the rock from which it came,
and in that instant it becomes itself the wind with a mind in time…
slow moving as it settles its way in circles down toward the earth again.
The light in its eye reflects the sage dry hills, the huckleberries’ red blood,
the glass of family homes outside Boulder, the sun coming back. It is
a gliding between facets of time traveled across multiple universes,
These mountains are the slow-moving tectonic waves of time
tumbling over each other, wind whipping off the froth, sand shifting
and pulling away at the roots of whatever grows, but at a speed we
live almost outside of except for instants like these when we sit
on our porch watching out over the western ranges peak beyond peak
and shadows flow across evening canyons, shifting shapes so I rise
from the land, seeing from outside my body the rocks and trees grow small,
hovering with my shoulders against them turning back the tide not at all
but feeling the physics that set us all in motion in distant galaxies so long ago.
We start then with muses, as Hesiod wrote, telling of things that are,
that will be and that were with voices joined in harmony, and we partake
of shadow and of eidos in ways that are outside the neurons of our minds.
A mountain is a fabric and a wrinkle in the text of time, and is but one muse,
the city at its feet is another, in a concurrent folding of the fabric.
From Grassroots (Wind Publications, 2010)
It Happens Right Here in Loveland, Colorado
at the G&W Sugar Beet Field Processing Plant
There is something sweet and hard in all men
and it is drawn out in our industry from the hard, dry ground,
It is drawn out and distilled from our sorrows and our struggles
from working together with our minds and our backs and our hands.
It is something at the center of our being, of our reality.
I think of it this time of year, walking knee-deep in the harvest fields
as the days grow shorter and the temperature begins to fall. We gather,
we neighbors who oversee the farmland, and the migrants, and the scientists too,
and the engineers who build factories and railroads and boxcars filled with night—
all looking for something sweet and meaningful at the center of our being.
We work together as we move through life,
and some of us walk out into the field as I do, and swing knives and tools
to shred the dark earth tubers that lie beneath us having drawn life
from the sand and water that lie along the banks of the Big Thompson,
within Loveland, we walk the fields rooting out rock hard fruits of labor
row upon row of men and women walking the fields in autumn
ripping these beets from the earth, collecting them in piles by the roads,
gathering them for processing and refinement, beating down these rock- hard
stones that no man might have thought to eat
but are the transition zone between desert and mountain, arid and water,
where we learn to turn our sorrow into the sweet crystals of man’s soul.
We do this every year. We pull the tubers from the soil.
We haul them off the field. We cut off the leaves that bring them sun,
and we shake the earth from them. We haul these gray slabs across the furrows
of the earth and pile them up for cars built in Detroit and trains built in Pennsylvania,
and we all work together having come from Russia and England and New York
and having worked the fields in Mexico and foundries in Chicago,
we come together in this rush of autumn humanity searching for something
that will enrich and sweeten the heart of our days in Loveland, Colorado.
We haul these gray tubers away into the dark bins of our days, but we
work with them, we refine them, we cut deeply into what they grew from,
we lay them out, grate them down, distill their juices. We do this together:
laborers, scientists, financial wizards who build steel and concrete monuments,
sweating together to find something clear and sweet within the darkest earth.
And here we see it, in this vacuum pan chamber where everything distills
like poetry
we see that crystal clear nugget that is at the core of every child’s dream,
something sweet to hang the dreams of a lifetime on where something sweet
comes from the hardest work that every kind of man and woman can do
working together in the seeding, planting, growing, and harvesting of seasons.
From Shadows Within The Roaring Fork (OR: Flowstone Press, 2017)
The City Within the City
is within the darkest brick alleyways
at the far end, over the cobblestones
behind the greyest most modest wall
where when the doors open chandeliers
(cut glass from the hard hands of Tiffany)
shaken by Brahms and Mozart notes,
where shadowed men speak in whispers|
slurring their words in aged whiskey or
rolling their vowels in brandy snifters
come together in every city nameless.
It is a place where Roman Cardinals
take off their shoes, turn water into wine
and pass bread among poor fishermen,
a place where Rothschilds sew buttons
onto the very fabric of industrial society,
knowing what seam clothes the factories,
what clothes the university professors,
and where the owners of the deepest mines
crush the land itself into the finest jewels.
It is a place linked by placelessness,
stretching across one continent to another
identified most by the silence of gravitas,
the number of communication lines run in,
the generations that have grown in-bred
that own the media that no one writes of,
that is the heartbeat that fills our lives.
Found almost always where least expected
it wears the dappled camouflage of soldiers
who have enlisted on the wings of angels,
and its music, its heady perfumes, baubles,
metaphysical incantations, whispered siren songs
are the darkest deepest richest fabric woven
in the city within the city within our home.
From Shadows Within The Roaring Fork (OR: Flowstone Press, 2017)
Deep in the Convenience Store
A man buys two pens
and puts them in his pocket
in the convenience store
the cash register accounts for two pens
as two wide angle cameras take him in
side the cameras four more pens
click into the man’s pockets
and the bar code reader sends data
while the parking lot camera scans two pens
clipped onto a sweat stained shirt, and
by the time he gets home 18 pens
bulge in his pocket, closing him in
while computers trace two pens back
to an assembly line in eastern Asia
where caps are placed on these things
The man lies awake all night. His pens become immense and
do not have enough ink to write poems of the people he has touched.
His pens have meant more to people than all the poems he writes.
He knows his pens are filled with hungry haunted nightmares.
From Shadows Within The Roaring Fork (OR: Flowstone Press, 2017)
That’s How It Is
Sunrise finds the New York shopkeepers rolling up their windows
dusting off the counters sweeping the floors shoveling their walkways
pulling pastries from dry hot ovens filling coffee pots to get the morning going
for the secretaries and executives and lawyers bankers insurance salesmen clerks
and the homeless too coming in quietly with their handfuls of fear and empty bellies
because it’s another day, and the workers do what workers do every blessed day
not too aware of what they do or whom they serve but it’s morning and they rise
and sunrise is indifferent as the clouds and passes on to Pennsylvania
and it reflects redness of the empty steel mills and foundries
where again the shopkeepers rise and here the miners line up for unemployment
or the lucky ones still go down into the darkness of the earth with fear in their hearts
and fishermen line up on the banks of the Alleghany with their thermoses
and a gum chewing girl from a diner clears egg-smeared plates from tables
watching the traffic that never ends go by along the interstate a seamless zipper
and sunrise hurries on its way out across the freighters on Lake Michigan
and the commodity traders working screaming toward heart attacks in Chicago
the endowed institutions of learning that line our cities the students half asleep
out over the heartland where the grain still grows so high it never touches ground
and on out over eastern and then western Kansas where the aquifers are drying
and the promise of America’s breadbasket is starting to grow thin
it moves on across the mountains of Colorado, hiding itself in valleys
and pointing out the oil well and ore dumps and abandoned ghost towns
the rusting scaffolding of the Roan Plateau the toxic sumps of Climax
and the shopkeepers rising to open their shops for the clerks and lawyers
ranchers driving their herds to the high country or to the low country
depending on the season
it changes but sunrise moves across it and as always work begins
and sunrise has no mind no consciousness of the shadows growing
and of how the same work has to start and be filled each day or
of the darkness that follows only hours behind and the light
behind that the tired muscles in a man’s arms the panic
at the morning table when the bills come out
the liquor sparkling in taverns after the day is gone
shimmering in the folks of evening gowns but
it moves on without reference to the thoughts of workers
sunrise brightens up the sands of Vegas and the roulette tables
the hookers high-rollers and papers in the gutters along the strip
the hangovers and empty wallets left over from the night before
and the shop owners the police the judges putting on their pants
the hotel windows glinting back a desert sandscape to the sky
but it moves on and peaks upon the Hollywood sign and the
cougar living in those hills and the movie makers making reality
and flattens out over the iron endless gray of the Pacific
but even as the surf is up off California it is growing darker
to the east and the day is as long as the motions we all go through.
From To The Dark Angels (New York Quarterly Books, 2015)
Love in Quantum Field Theory
I am awake with the mountain cats,
perturbations in the shadows of nothingness.
There are four fields in quantum theory,
open flowings without fences,
dimpled with the circles of disruption
splashed from infinite possibilities on themselves,
of those things that go through a cat’s eye
and are the eye of the dark cat beyond night,
night- light within the beginning of all things.
We circle around upon through each other, bosons,
each dimpled ripple seeking something in the curve
that entwined without mind in the dimpled curve
is sensed most perfectly as being what we need
as things that have no needs beyond ourselves.
And I don’t know now as dusk settles time space
like a liquid crystal cat display in window glass
what gravity this has that causes the fields
to feed upon themselves, to flow between
the stones that are the field or the flesh.
Perhaps a field out beyond the fences built
will be found to flow between the currents
ebbing forever in the tidal flow. Perhaps
there is nothing that can disrupt field theory
dimpling on itself except some other force
where life finds life within each other
creating not another like itself but life
creating what no other force can feel or be,
switching back and forth a lover’s lazy gaze
sinuous as the dreams of anything, falling
through everything with the weight of life
lost in the majesty of mindless certainty.
Appearing.
From Shadows Within The Roaring Fork (OR: Flowstone Press, 2017)
Lake Peterson
This is a small lake but deep,
nestled in the throat of a volcano
surrounded by miles of moose and elk
foraging their ways among aspen and fir,
the chuckling of martens and porcupines,
the silence of Colorado coyotes at dusk.
A sunset brightening horizon fills this lake
as it fills the sleek bellies of trout down
in their darkness
with eyes that perceive what cannot be
spoken,
what cannot be shared across flesh.
And the wind which passes among pines
moves across this lake without moving it,
meaning that small waves dance in place
where shore meets land again and again,
almost as on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean
except there are fewer people here
and there are no billboards, no road.
This is a small lake that matters little
where an eco-system of life encompasses
little meaning on the edge of infinity,
and the sun is its reflected surface
and its voiceless denizens are dark
with the bright colors of stars on their skin,
and the voice and temperature of the earth
funneled deep into its concave infinite depth.
From To the Dark Angels (New York Quarterly Books, 2015)
All poems are opyright 2018 by Jared Smith
