JAZZ

artwork: ralph murre

JAZZ

by Jackie Langetieg

I don’t want to go to Chet Baker’s house

Let him come to me, lean his back against

the scene of ancient Chinese mountains in my living room

Let me serve him Metaxa brandy in a water glass

Don’t let the smoke leave the room––nothing should fly out

on the wings of notes coming from his horn, his voice his hands

words left hanging on black clefs of minor chords

I’m loose on the sofa, Robe slightly open hoping he’ll notice

baby grand ready for his touch

like the counting of my ribs, each finger placed surely

on the steps of my spine.

I feel his concentration on the music

I’m just a body temporarily in his way for tonight

The old serrated trees on the panel behind me sway

and fantasy fills my head. The music trails off and he joins me

We speak little, lie to each other, talk of insignificances

Soon dawn is opening the curtains of night and he drives off

leaving me lost in the smoky night music still at play in the room.

~ first published in Norbert Blei’s Poetry Dispatch

The Moroccan Leather Briefcase

artwork: ralph murre

The Moroccan Leather Briefcase

by Jackie Langetieg

What I really wanted that day,

handling the soft Moroccan leather,

was to be a person who went to Morocco

or Egypt, or Kashmir—someplace exotic,

where a man in a white flowing burnoose

with black and silver ropes would see I was lost

and offer to lead me back to my people and

on the way, we stop at a dark café, sip

strong coffee poured from a long-handled carafe

into small brass cups filigreed with whirls

of romantic Arabic, and tell each other our mysteries.

His robes flow over his body. His

lean brown fingers stroke my hand; I quiver

as desire pools in my belly. His neat black beard raises

tiny hairs on my neck; then his lips begin at the crevice

of my scapula skip down to my clavicle, around

my breasts, and slowly trace an untraceable path

to my navel. Clothes frantically tossed

onto a rattan chair, bodies

clasped together . . . what!

Do I want to buy the briefcase?

Yes, yes, yes.

~ first published in Confetti in a Silent City

Tai Chi in 4 Movements

digital manipulation (ralph murre) of garment embroidery (artist unknown)

Tai Chi in 4 Movements

by Jackie Langetieg

I.  The Beginning

The teacher wears black and white,

light in opposition to dark--the symbol

for yin and yang.  Unknowingly

over half the group does, too,

I don’t feel as fat as I dreaded.

The warm-up is just camouflaged exercise,

but the sparkling day bribes me to enjoy it.

My hibernated muscles stretch stubbornly

I’m awkward--an elephant trying to be a jaguar.

II. The Form

My body tries to forget itself

return to the rhythm of nature.

I walk heavy, like a bear,

filled with bear power.

My chest is a box, my spine a string of pearls

connected to the universe.  I shift my weight

to the left foot, my right arm lifts on the kiss

of a breeze--weight

an anachronism of no weight.

Practice anything, she says in today’s farewell--

even if it’s wrong.  Next time you’ll have something

to correct. 

She didn’t check my form, touch my leg.

Am I already perfect?

Or has she deferred to the old bear instead--

left it to its lost causes.

III.  The Practice

I am in the barefoot dark--I step out cautiously

turning my right foot, stepping strongly on my left heel

settling into my balance.

I loosen my belly’s tension, turn my head,

pulling it past stiff neck muscles

rigid prisoners of my clenched jaw.

Just when foot is firm and body balanced--

the lean in to the wind thrilling as an untried lover--

a new direction is demanded.

Practice.  I don’t know where my balance

will meet my movement. Practice.

Start again in the familiar footfall,

turning,

leaning out,

feeling the sweet soul-kiss of new space made mine.

IV.  Animal Frolics

Resting deer, walking deer

press

fall back

turn

swing arm--not able to think like a deer

because I’m watching the teacher.

I close my eyes and become the deer,

drift through dark

                          rest

                                pull back

                                        listen for danger

                                                 press forward.

The pond wears its cool scent--

I walk on small boned hooves toward marsh grass,

ears up, tongue on the roof of my mouth,

jaw relaxed.

Each cool Tai Chi morning

of these storm-surrounded days remains perfect.

My garlic and brewers yeast discourage lazy mosquitoes.

Perhaps another night I’ll become a mosquito,

bite the deer, take her heart into my own,

and fly through the woods bending and pawing the earth.

~ first published by The Wisconsin Academy for Science, Arts, and Letters

THE MAN WITH HAIR OF SMOKE

artwork: ralph murre

THE MAN WITH HAIR OF SMOKE

by Jackie Langetieg

I'd like to make love to a man with long hair--

caught behind his head, tied

with the false cord of commitment.

Capturing his eyes, I'd slip the noose,

thread my fingers through dark silk,

listen to his lies.

He lifts me   

             his hair swings forward

                                      sears my cheek

                                                  becomes smoke  

                        In the half lighted forest 

        his skin burnishes to bronze

I hear drums

taste sweet tallow on his shoulders.

~ first published: Small Cards by Barbara

Father Writes to Mother . . .

photo: ralph murre

Father Writes to Mother from California

by Jackie Langetieg

I remember Grandmother’s voice

and crickets clicking behind the radiator,

feasting on dust from fresh baked bread

while I lay on the window seat

watching her polish the mound of dough

                        pushing and turning it on its powdery board.

Looking over at me, she dropped

a small plastic doll into the mix

folded and smoothed it into a ball

while she told me of earthquakes

in San Francisco

and how the ground would open

like cut dough,

then fold over a small girl and her mother 

rolling, kneading and sealing them

into the bread of the earth, sent to the oven to bake,

disappearing beneath the cooling crust.

~ first published by the Wisconsin Academy of Arts, Science, and Letters

A Brief Excerpt

photoart: ralph murre

A Brief Excerpt

by Jackie Langetieg

What must it have been like

swimming beneath her heart in that dark, silken sea?

Wind has frozen the lake into a black mirror. Its endlessness reminds me of a birth night: traveling through space lit by pinpoints of stellar ice.  (She comes at night when I'm asleep, entering the room on the whim of a breeze, waits for that one second during everyone’s night--a pause between breathing out and the beginning of breathing in. She leans down and whispers a single astonishing note like the cry of a forest flute on the breeze. Whenever I hear that memory song, a shutter snaps; perhaps I glance behind me on a too quiet street or wake in the dark and know that what woke me was more than just a sound.  It stops me; I see into her eyes, wait a second and go on.)

~ an excerpt from White Shoulders ( Cross + Roads Press ) 

Letter To My Daughter

artwork: ralph murre

Letter To My Daughter
by Jackie Langetieg

We never had the chance to know
the secrets of each other—how I learned to braid,
first with your great, great grandmother’s
silk stockings, crossing one over the other and then,
her unbound white hair—alive in my hands.

Would you have remembered

my touch on your cheek, breathing in your newness
kissing the soft fuzz on your head? When you became a teen,
I would have helped you add an outrageous color
to your blondness—would you have chosen magenta
like the young woman at work—to match her motorcycle? I chose
green food coloring on St. Patrick’s Day when I was fifteen, and

I would have told you

how I put a henna rinse in your grandmother’s hair,
the label promising to take away the gray. How it went orange
and we washed it again and again until she gave up
and covered the pale melon shade with a babushka, and
when you were older, you could have helped me comfort her
when chemo thinned her thick white hair.

And daughter

I would welcome your strength now, in my sixties,
lost in remembering what keeps and what fades. Still,
I feel some part of you here when I am waking or drifting into sleep—
the woman who stands on my shoulders and the shoulders
of all the women in our clan—that soul
who tried to find me when I was twenty, your nest
left in the pink disappearing water.

~ first published by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters

FOXFIRE

digital art: ralph murre

Foxfire

by Jackie Langetieg

(fox-fire n. A phosphorescent glow on rotting wood)

When all sound has sifted away,
streaming lamplight and car beams
gone like the moon turning her back,
darkness caresses with dense electricity
the bone and breath of the sleepless.
These are not night terrors
or machinations of the worrier
or daydreams of the romantic
but the held breath of the dying
evading the hound whose eyes search the forest,
tongue lolling, saliva dripping with anticipation.
I try and hide my luminescence
wrapped in this unraveling garment,
hoping to arrive at yet another morning
where we all look alike.

~ previously published in Confetti in a Silent City