2 Poems

Poetry / AJ White

 

:: Elsewhere’s Rain ::


My father watches me drink from
the corner of the motel room—
his stubble his grey face
I don't know him
but for years he will
keep getting in—
he is grasping after
my hand hauling me
across the void
the earth drags through.

                    ✦

Indigo hillside tidal wave,
wet stars luring tongues out of my interior—
the moon's white eye,
milk grin—
sky's cold atomic bonfire,
starlight more cleansing than rain.

                    ✦

All that year I ran down to the river
hoping to sober
but waiting to die—
the river grew a mouth
& drank me, much later
I grew covetous & flew.

                    ✦

There is a gleaming
& a concealing in this life,
an inner &
an outer proof.


                    ✦

Great wheel of the world
with light-year spokes,
my planet an aquamarine
marble in a shooter's game.

                    ✦

In the gutter, under
my toe, softer
than anticipated,
chickadee.

                    ✦

Blue throat of daylight,
death's six-walled jade tomb.

                    ✦

If life is not a miracle it is
a profound chemical emergence—
yet so often daybreak disappears
all I know of life on earth.

                    ✦

Black door in the mountainside,
blue door in the blade forest—
white door interlocutor onto
red-door grey-flesh room.

                    ✦

Stop, & feel the planet in its death roll—
which is meaner, gravity or light?

                    ✦

When at last you departed from me
I became you, watched you bloom
in sadness toward me,
hid within pity's wide mouth
like a minor chord:
sovereign, defiant & true.

                    ✦

From a secret place, suddenly,
clouds become what you want to see.

                    ✦

My hands hymnal into cistern;
rainclouds blister into rain.

:: I Was Here Before & Will Be Here Again ::

I watch a time-lapse ani­ma­tion of the Appalachi­ans squig­ging up into exis­tence over tens or hun­dreds of mil­lions of years. How colos­sal were the sloths &, con­se­quent­ly, how slow? They appeal to me. Light­ning strikes & the ridges blaze & per­haps the sloths escape or not. There are pain-deep blue lakes & scaled fish in them & this is the earth. Myopic, we con­coct­ed heav­en, too naïve to see that we are born into it, we are the angels, test­ed under the same rubric of all tests: pre­tend this is real. Don’t you rub up against the set vari­ables, slid­ing scales, are you not sure in qui­et moments that, even if you don’t know which it is, your life is a lan­guage or ethics prob­lem lead­ing to a sin­gle answer alone? You know your answer already yet feel com­pelled to evince a choice because as we choose, again & again, we are learn­ing which con­di­tions cor­re­late with whom choos­ing what. This is called lit­er­a­ture, & the exam con­firms the hypoth­e­sis: I am every­one & I choose me. There was a time when I did not feel this way, when you held my hand & loved me, then it felt like I could die, evap­o­rate calm­ly into mist. Some­times now the sky dark­ens & I walk into the dreams where I see you think­ing lead us not; deliv­er us. Wish that I could keep just the won wis­dom of arrival & not recall the jour­ney here. Do you remem­ber the great flames? They will return, you will see that they were always around, in the adja­cent room that’s for­ev­er been there but that you’d nev­er dreamed of open­ing. Open it: the lover sits at a small table sip­ping tea, does­n’t speak as you walk past them to the win­dow above the sink, unsash it to harsh light. When you turn around they are not there. But they are not gone.

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

Man, what isn’t in “Elsewhere’s Rain”? It’s a sig­ni­fi­er sal­ad spritzed with pet­ri­chor. It’s hon­est­ly a bit over-laden: per­son­al nar­ra­tive (I could take you to that motel room—the car­pet was wine red), col­or-the­o­ris­tic iconog­ra­phy, word­play, a dead bird, a line I took from anoth­er of my poems then gave to a friend then took back, a shoutout to Jean Valen­tine (as is the whole poem), etc. Elsewhere’s rain is one of my favorite phe­nom­e­na: the dark cur­tain of rain you can see on the hori­zon when it isn’t rain­ing here. My past life, my active addic­tion, looks to me now like elsewhere’s rain. I can see it, off in the dis­tance: an opaque, sta­t­ic haze.

Some of what isn’t in that poem is in “I Was Here Before & Will Be Here Again” because, you know, life is cycli­cal, and one day I might dri­ve back into that rain again. I hope not, but I might. Sor­ry to get exis­ten­tial, but it’s impor­tant­ly true. I have been through a lot and will go through it all again in some form, the good and the bad and the amor­phous. I hope the mid­dle sec­tion of this poem, which is the last poem in my book, where I allow myself to preach, once, briefly, is not too annoy­ing. There is much we do not know about why we are here. But I sus­pect, in terms of some unknown variable(s), our uni­verse is a test. Per­haps it is being run for the ben­e­fit of some­thing that no longer exists. Everything—your whole life—feels like a test because it like­ly, in some ulti­mate sense or degree, is. Data may well be col­lect­ed or col­lec­table at the universe’s end by some­thing, even if you do not think you will be dis­cern­able as an enti­ty with­in it.

AJ White is a poet and edu­ca­tor from north Geor­gia. AJ’s debut poet­ry col­lec­tion, Blue Loop, was select­ed for the 2024 Nation­al Poet­ry Series by Chelsea Ding­man, to be pub­lished by Uni­ver­si­ty of Geor­gia Press in Sep­tem­ber 2025. AJ’s poems have won the Fugue Poet­ry Prize, select­ed by Kaveh Akbar, and an Acad­e­my of Amer­i­can Poets Uni­ver­si­ty Prize, select­ed by Tara Betts. Oth­er poems have been pub­lished recent­ly in Best New Poets, Over­heard, West Trade Review, and in the antholo­gies Ecobloom­spaces and Green Verse. AJ lives and teach­es cre­ative writ­ing in New York.