Punctum

Lesley Jenike

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781631012983
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

"In Punctum:, Lesley Jenike's new collection, she writes, 'It's our language: what can we call a thing that is and is not.' These poems are haunted by a 'non-child, ' a child who was not to be born, and with it, a life the speaker was not to live. Absence itself becomes a nearly tangible presence. I don't know how Jenike does it—breaks your heart and makes you want more—but I can't remember the last time I read poems as smart and sure and devastatingly precise in their language, imagery, and feeling. In a poem about a fateful ultrasound, one that reveals no fetal heartbeat, she writes, 'the doctor calls it "practice, " snapping off // the screen, tearing up the spit-out photograph. / "Next time, " she says, "it'll be the real thing."' Mark my words: these poems are—and this poet is—the real thing. Punctum: is a remarkable accomplishment." —Maggie Smith

"Riffing on Barthes's notion of punctum, his 'third meaning, ' and its other definitions—tear duct, small point, strike-through—Jenike creates, with her Punctum:, a love song to the lost child, to the living child, to the ineffable nonexistent, and to the abundant existent that takes my breath away. This collection's fulsome lines and literary touchstones balance precariously, sometimes archaically, always brilliantly, with the gravities of the physical body and the ruins of our 21stcentury planet to give us something new, rare, and important." —Kathy Fagan

SPLITTING THE LARK

“Nature is a haunted house—but Art—is a house that tries to be haunted.”

—Emily Dickinson

because everything’s explicable—

the little mountains, the little river,

the woods for all their sinister mushroom

and fern, the bones of a lark so hollowed

by design no one need look. But look now,

we’re splitting apart. We find our song

by sliding on headphones, by logging on

to databases and choosing the bird

by shape to hear its voice delivered

electronically like faith. In the breach

where the fulcrum was, in place of the hinge

is the nothing I was worried about,

the nothing to close the door, the nothing

to open it, the nothing to swivel

the sky near: its clouds above us props

in a lark about wombs or locks.

We drowse

in cattails and listen: purple martins

speaking honeyed garbage, flocks as from

a sand dollar spilling into the hand

that split it. We think we can hear our lost

baby, now a grade-schooler, chance sovereign

of the falls, exultant as I hold him

over the rocks, and like a jackdaw gab

his native talk—all words run together

in a nonsense pot of lush syllables—

then he’s gone again. Ours is a haunted house

that shifts on its axis, and we’re back

at the start, walking childless to the river

where it falls. But no, it’s not the house, not

the dozer by the dig. It’s not the falls.

It’s our language: what can we call a thing

that is and is not—that gush of feeling

we stand-in for river, the feeling of

having let drop the gold in goldenrod,

till what’s left but the sting and spring of blood?

A MOTHER GIVES BIRTH TO
SOMEONE WHO WON’T LAST

With thanks to Fanny Howe

Morning come the inevitable separation:

a body from its sheet, finch from its perch

on our car’s side mirror. You’re like the sun

up from a crouch under Prospect Hill

sliding the rickrack curtains open

and the sad lab past a stand of trees breaks

from sleep to start his morning sob, a sigh

to part the vapors. A mob of Harleys,

in for their annual rally, crack

the pavement and practically split the air

in half. Time is a lake, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• The Canon
• Practice
• Proofs
• Walhalla
• The First Appeal
• Realty
• Twelfth Night
• The Mirror Stage
• The Hawk
• Splitting the Lark
• A Mother Gives Birth to Someone Who Won’t Last
• “The Sun Is God”
• St. Francis and the Newborn
• The Beast
• Reading Whitman Postpartum
• Punctum