Jordan Stempleman


Courtesy Piles

What then goes
with the ordinary?
There are engineers
for the side chambers
of our captioning drifts.
Three things
taken with the meanwhile
just ahead of them, their features
lessening as they go.

I got past it all
one day, early
into the morning, still in the mascara
that curiously left
my eyes
for where my face took on
sustention—the rest
to follow, likewise to age.

There are four bed sheets
to swap
throughout the months.
Once they turn
into themselves, carried
by our fatigue
to think nothing of what stands,
all hope will center
on what we suppose
may lie down.

The cold drink letting itself go
on the nightstand. The entry
of precisely what notices
the least expensive grain, toggling out
from the back
of the truck, is who’s testimony
we’ve waited for all our lives.

Such immediate demands.
Such a change, no doubt, to fixate
on getting there, and having to make up
for confusing the features
of our town. The stand-in
for our unseasonable home.

Striking the idea, the tension released
was endless. A plastic bag
for each part of the furnace,
many bags
having been taped up, and now,
crowded around the tank.

I have begun to itemize
all the phone calls where I became upset
with how often nothing I said
came through. They are precautions,
mainly, shaded excerpts
of calling the eastern quails’ call
a howie chirp, or something like that.
Well, it was a funny painting
anyway, maybe you’ll be there one day
to see it on your own.

In an online search,
the town looked to have no bars, one museum
of regional heritage, a school
of hair design, and lots of places
for camping and fishing.
Moving to the next town over,
I began to favor bringing each attraction
closer, considering them
as possible careers
if only they would become more concrete,
as in: those buildings
and openings I passed each day
when I had nowhere else to go.

But I had planned on the waiting.
It’s identity, much as it needs
to be mistaken, has the mobility
of an easier life, and so,
is always possessed by the one
who has missed
or is missing so many.
That’s how it always comes through, binning
what’s expected as sightly as it can, hiding
what may well be, in the underlying layer
for what will make the rest seem urgent
and oncoming, the force
most commonly misnamed.

To imagine, there are ducks
now straddling what’s left
of my responsive shade.
And in all that winter between,
there were longer phases
that kept watch of the saying:
a little more dailyness please
to round-up the undeniably dormant
or so the group so often asked to be called.

The trouble with the other members: they don’t keep up
with their conditions enough
to falsecast all the empty intensity from the room.
There’s the story of one life, and then the other, and the listening
port between the two reliefs are in the process
of ending all talk. The day when we sleep on our feet, head on feet,
unusual to hear it happening that way, we will see the last parvenu
we horsed around with, some might say a bit too rough, answering
to what merely confirms our position. Then again,
yes, and then again.

Jordan Stempleman is the author of Their Fields (Moria e-books, 2005) and What's the Matter (Otoliths, 2007). Recent work is forthcoming in The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, New American Writing, Outside Voices: 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets, and P-Queue.


 
 
 
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