Jay Leeming

I read about this guy in a local newspaper on my living room floor while I was hosting a party. His poems are not conventional. I myself am daunted by writing a poem, all of the organization and rhyming schemes overshadow the process of actually delivering a message. This guy just gets down to the point. Here is the way I look at the world without any fancy fluff, he says. They could almost be considered short stories, the way they are all tiny glimpses into Leeming's universe. It helps reading them through a few times, then reading them aloud. Even as I was typing these I noticed new meanings and images. Okay, here we go:

THE BARBER
The barber is someone who creates
by taking away, like a writer
who owns only an eraser.
He is like a construction company

that begins with a large office building
and ends up with a small wooden house.
On the wall is his license,
showing that he's been to school

and learned of all the varieties
of loss. For this reason
a haircut can make me nervous;
sometimes I close my eyes

and hear only the snip
of the scissors, their two gleaming halves
talking of the balance that is here, the partnership
between this man in a blue smock

and the hairs faithful as rain,
that even before birth and after death
flow tirelessly out of the head
toward the comb and the blade.



ROWBOAT
An oar is a paddle with a home. This arrangement seems awkward at first, as if it were wrong; the wood knocks in the oarlock, and would much rather be a church steeple, or the propeller of an old airplane in France. Yet as it bites deep into the wave it settles down, deciding that the axe and the carpenter were right. And you, too, are supposed to be sitting this way, back turned to what you want, watching your history unravel across the waves are your legs brush against the gunnels. Your feet are restless, wanting to be more involved. But your back is what gets you there, closer to what finally surprises you from behind: waves lapping at the shore, the soft nuzzle of sand.



SUGARHOUSE
After the funeral, my mother and her sister
were caught for days in the sugarhouse
of their parent's belongings, sorting through dishes
and clothes, tables and chairs, dividing much of it
between them, throwing some things out, giving
others away and setting the dearest things aside
to be divided later. In this way
they boiled the house down
until they were left with the two last
precious things: the maple syrup pitcher
and the sugar bowl. As if
after childhood was poured away
each vessel was still sweet
from years of caring, though empty now.



SUPERMARKET HISTORIANS
All historians should be supermarket cashiers.
Imagine what we'd learn;
"Your total comes to $10.66,
and that's the year the Normans invaded Britain"
or, "That'll be $18.61, the year
the Civil War began."

Now all my receipts are beaches
where six-year-olds find bullets in the sand.
My tomatoes add up to Hiroshima,
and if I'd bought one more carton of milk
the cashier would be discussing the Battle of the Bulge
and not the Peloponnesian War.

But I'm tired of buying soup cans
full of burning villages,
tired of hearing the shouts of Marines
storming beaches in the bread aisle.
I want to live in a house
carved into a seed
inside a watermelon,
to look up at the red sky
as shopping carts roll through the aisles
like distant thunder.



THE LIGHT ABOVE CITIES
Sitting in darkness,
I see how the light of the city
fills the clouds, rosewater light
poured into the sky
like the single body we are. It is the sum
of a million lives, a man drinking beer
beneath a light bulb, a dancer spinning
in a fluorescent room, a girl reading a book
beneath a lamp.

Yet there are others- astronomers,
thieves, lovers- whose work is only done
in darkness. Sometimes
I don't want to show these poems
to anyone, sometimes
I want to remain hidden, deep in the coals
with the one who pulls the stars
through a telescope's glass, the one who listens
for the click of the lock, the one
who kisses softly a woman's eyes.



APPLE
Sometimes when eating an apple
I bite too far
and open up the little room
the lovers have prepared,
and teh seeds fall
onto the kitchen floor
and I see
that they are tear-shaped.

Chesterton

We can't help but fall into a ritual, no matter how simple, of day to day life. It is simply beneficial to our health and well-being to be able to find recluse in the well worn necessities- sleep, sitting down for a meal, commuting, laundry. This tasks are so menial and silly, yet take up most of our waking lives. Picking up the clothes from the floor and making the bed seem so unnecessary when all of my work will be undone in a matter of hours by none other than myself. But some of these things we simply cannot escape. Many individuals, raised on the belief that a mid-sized SUV and 9-5 job will bring success and happiness in itself, find themselves drowning in these inescapable chores. Sometimes they aren't even chores. Sometimes they are just situations, conversations that we find ourselves in repeatedly. How many times can you go to a party on a Saturday night and drink a few beers uncomfortably in a corner? This is supposed to be the climax of the week! The reason you worked for hours beforehand- to reward yourself with some relaxation. But even these moments, pregnant with expectation, can seem worn-out and thin. They lose their meaning because, honestly, you can't help but repeat yourself over and over in life. It is simply impossible not to do so. This is the cue for feeling a terribly empty sense of doom coming over the horizon. Life is like a coloring book. In itself, it is, or oftentimes can be, completely meaningless. It is up to you to fill in the blanks, give it color, movement and emotion. You have several mediums to work with- religion, work, love, family, adventure. All of them serving as different pens, pencils and paints, at your own disposal to change your outlook. Your life can be nothing, or it can be everything all at once. It all depends on how you choose to make it. It can be filled with moments so banal as waiting for the light to change, pouring the milk out of the carton and changing the sheets. Or you can use your imagination, fill them with excitement and novelty. The novelist Chesterton divulges his definition of the imagination as "not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settle things strange." Whenever I ride down hills on my bike and catch a glimpse of my coat snapping behind me in the wind, I imagine that I am a roque wizard flying stealthilly through a modern civilization, oblivious to my mischevious presence. Driving my car over the winding mountain roads, I lose my will power to the brute mentality of a stampeding ram, tumbling around bends and scurrying over hills. Here is an excerpt from an article I read about Chesterton:

"Most of the inconvenienes that make men swear or women cry are really sentimental or imaginative inconveniences- things altogether of the mind. For instance, we often hear grown-up people complaining of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train. Did you ever hear a small boy complain of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train? No; for him to be inside a railway station is to be inside a cavern of wonder and a palace of poetical pleasures. Because to him the red light and the green light on the signal are like a new sun and a new moon. Because to him when the wooden arm, of the signal falls down suddenly, it is as if a great king had thrown down his staff as a signal and started a shrieking tournament of trains. I myself am of little boys' habit in this matter. They also serve who only stand and wait for the two fifteen."

As we grow older, many of us shed our imaginations. We figure it is not real and therefore it is no longer useful to us. Who are we to make a final ruling on what is real and what is not? And as children, our imaginations were just as real to us as the dog bowl or our dinner napkin, so why should that change? It would be completely useful to us, in my opinion, to stimulate our imaginations despite our age. Next time you walk into the kitchen to prepare that sandwich you have been eating for months on end, why not transform that butter knife into an ax that you delve into an enemy soldiers, or loaf of bread's, side as you defend your Kitchen homeland from the ruthless invaders of Hungary. (har har, get it?)