2 Poems by Jordan Escobar

An Alpine Lake Under a Birdless Sky

………………………..You’re tired of summer.

………………………..You want to stop all the singing.

………………………..And everything is singing. 

………………………..-Larry Levis

Dip into the silence. Some mountains,

some memories, some vowels remain

garbled in your loose refraining mouth.

How profane, in this moment, to be 

any other than living. How sacred 

to wish for another vein to course 

bloody heart to bloody heart. In Alaska,

everything is relative and everything

is a relative. Day becomes night 

as night wads its jealous fist 

at the flattened sun. There is no doing.

There is nothing. Each permafrost

root is connected to another. The caribou

alone in a field. Whiteness like a page

that expands and expands. The memoir

no one is reading. If we could trace hoofprints,

we might make a new language. We might

go primal. We might learn how to love

open air, solemnity, the hush of water

enveloping you. To be completely

swallowed in that blue hole 

that was always there. That was always

waiting and wanting. We might count

the seconds of breath we have left

in this solidifying life,

this untamable winter.

Enough Noise To Make a Singing

Our lives are a monument to our own dying:

How many forlorn summers spent in those golden hills?

The spray-gun would not jump from your palms. The keys

would not turn the engine over. Nights, you had to remind yourself

of your age. The shadows of grapes and almonds cast by the afternoon sun.

Nights, you had to remember what waking was like: a bomb that wouldn’t go off.

Fallow. Days, you had to remember which fruit falls from a shaken tree. You had to

keep your brow moist with your sweaty hands, you had to stroke your own hair,

you had to feel your whiskers. Sure, there were birds. Sure, there were cats for the birds,

and a band of wild restless dogs that roved the ranch searching for scraps. But what

did we know? We were those dogs. Each Friday night. One man with a snare,

one man with a guitar and the sulfur glow of an ancient lamp. Yes, the woodsmoke was burning,

and the carne asada needed to be turned, and that odor could carry you into the rest of the year,

could make you last seasons, could pry you loose into this sense of forgetting. Corporeal bats

clicked at the insects overhead. Sure, we were rushing towards midnight. And drinking every

drop of tequila. We were hugging and holding each other in a way that only men can

hug and hold each other. In way that used darkness to blanket us. We had separate lives 

to unfold. Sunken chests and ropy veins. Soil buried in the creases. Earth always in us.

And tbe flickering charcoal made a whisper you had to lean in close to hear. Like a cicada’s wings 

saying: This is enough and This will never be and Close your eyes, come closer, listen. 

Jordan Escobar is a writer in Jamaica Plain, MA. His work can be found or forthcoming in Zone 3, Willow Springs, Colorado Review and elsewhere. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and been the recipient of a fellowship with the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. He currently divides his time teaching at Emerson College and Babson College and working as a professional beekeeper.

21 March 2022