Córdoba: Mezquita, and: Vermont: Fish & Wildlife, and: Enchanters of Addison County Major Jackson (bio) CÓRDOBA Mezquita Even if he'd pulled over to study Andalusia's road signs,after one thousand and one nights, he still couldnot make out its calligraphic script, its vertical lines,its dots, marks like smoke stilled from incense, its curledsand soft Arabic, but this city's voice has coffinsand carnations, and its hoarse singing shoots through himlike twelve bars of earthen road that lengthensinto a labyrinth of knowing, blood beneath black skin.More echoes: the Alhambra sent him back to the seraglioof his youth where a Moorish guard stood in a museum,unfazed by a harem's rising laughter behind palace doors.Here are pillars and banded arches to once againimagine the body passing through like a key into infinity.Was this the answer to his ghetto past? But why travelso far? Since a child, even in sleep, he voyaged and broke free,tossing dice in dreams below deck on a caravelnext to grains of paradise. He's collecting a thousand faces.He's moving beneath eyelids, turning time into flesh.Don't judge him. The courtyard's orange trees where oncehe washed like a morisco is teaching his tongue the craft. [End Page 253] VERMONT Fish & Wildlife The lake's cold shacks of ice fishing anglersspeeds by like homeless shanties. This is North Country,where a cabin's fireplace wears moose antlers,where the mesmeric drift of snow snakes Route 30sending a chalk-white F150 plummeting into a ditch.Icicles above Stewart's hover like liquid spears.A shawled neighbor in silhouette is a witchbut you believe in the company of man and seek a cold beerand the crackling fire of a bar up the road whose patrons'talk of deadly snowmobile accidents steams its frontwindow. Gossip turns the evening darker, and the nationmight as well be this small shadowy room half in huntinggear, eyeing the blond whipping some boy at a haloedpool table. Outside, a grumbling snowplow barrels upthe street like a middle linebacker. A truckloadof modern furniture sits in the parking lot. Yep,someone says to a Bruins loss: Yep, shoulda won thatone there. The almost bare streets seem clutchedin ice, wind dusting up crystals in orange street light.Old men in Franklin County dream of being touched. [End Page 255] ENCHANTERS OF ADDISON COUNTY We were more than gestural, close-listening,the scent of manure writing its waft on the leavesoff Route 22A. By nightfall, our gaze fleckedlike loon cries, but no one was up for turnipsnor other roots, not least of which the clergy.Romanticism has its detractors, which is whywe lined the road with tea-lit luminariesand fresh-cut lemons. We called it making magic,then stormed the corners and porchesof General Stores, kissing whenever cars idledat four way stop signs or sought Grade A maple syrupin tin containers with painted scenes of horse-drawnfarmers plowing through snow. The silhouetted, rustedfarm equipment gave us the laidback heavenwe so often wished, and fireflies bequeathed earth stars,such blink and blank and bunk-a-bunk-bunk.And of course we wondered if we existed,and also too, the cows in the ancient pastures,and the white milk inside our headslike church spires and ice cream cones.Even after all of that cha-cha-cha, we still cameout of swimming holes shivering our hearts out. [End Page 254] Major Jackson MAJOR JACKSON is author of four volumes of poetry: Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006), and Leaving Saturn (2001). In addition to being a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for his first book of poems, he is a recent Guggenheim Fellow and has also been honored by the Whiting Foundation, the Witter Bynner Foundation, the Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at the University of Vermont and a core member of the faculty of the...
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