Anna Jackson
  • Home
  • Poems
  • Books
    • Pasture and Flock
    • I, Clodia, and other portraits
    • Thicket
    • The gas leak
    • Catullus for children
    • The pastoral kitchen
    • The long road to teatime
    • Last stop before insomnia
    • Dear tombs, dear horizon
    • The Bedmaking Competition
  • About
  • Actions and Travels
  • News and Enthusiasms
  • Catullus translations
  • Home
  • Poems
  • Books
    • Pasture and Flock
    • I, Clodia, and other portraits
    • Thicket
    • The gas leak
    • Catullus for children
    • The pastoral kitchen
    • The long road to teatime
    • Last stop before insomnia
    • Dear tombs, dear horizon
    • The Bedmaking Competition
  • About
  • Actions and Travels
  • News and Enthusiasms
  • Catullus translations
Search by typing & pressing enter

YOUR CART

Emersonian headache sestina 
         
This headache seems to me Emersonian         
in its depths and grapples, in the bioluminescence
of the ache behind the eyes. Braless   
because even the touch of the bedsheets  
on my skin is too much, I reach for the dextromethorphan  
but cough so hard it is like canoeing 
 
in rapids, and grasping at anything is like a canoeing
person trying to grasp at roots along an Emersonian
river rushing past so fast the dextromethorphan
is already a distant dream.  More bioluminescence
is flaring up behind my eyes, and the bedsheets
are getting more rumpled, root-like themselves.  Braless
 
felt different when it was in your company, braless
I felt dressed more for canoodling than canoeing,
or undressed for canoodling, the bedsheets
doing all the dressing up, dressing the bed with Emersonian
flourishes, day hovering around the night like bioluminescence
hovering around the depths of the ocean, no dextromethorphan
 
needed then!  There it sits, the dextromethorphan,
on the table, just out of my braless
reach.  I wonder if you’d think me sexy now, a bioluminescence
of memory in your sad and gentrified life.  Canoeing
is probably something you do for real, having Emersonian
thoughts about self-reliance in your expensive canoe, bedsheets
 
back at the house for you with their high thread count, bedsheets
costing more than my bed, table, dextromethorphan,
and probably everything else in my room put together, Emersonian
self-reliance in my case meaning making do.  Even when not braless
I am quite close to possessionless, any canoeing
I do entirely imaginary, the bioluminescence
 
of my headache the most glamour I’ve seen for ages - bioluminescence
all of my very own!  (And, though I might be currently braless
again, I do actually have both bras and bedsheets now.)  Who wants to go canoeing
anyway, when you can stay in bed, the dextromethorphan
just as nice really as champagne, and less likely to saturate the bedsheets
(remember?), especially when I can’t even reach it.  “Emersonian!”
 
you mocked me on your fancy bedsheets, thinking a word like Emersonian
pretentious, positively bioluminescently pretentious, as if being braless
meant I should also be illiterate.  Even so, I like to picture you canoeing…
                                                                        as I reach, again, for my dextromethorphan. 



Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.