Jenny Kiss’d Me

Jenny kiss’d me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss’d me,
Say I’m growing old, but add,
Jenny kissed me!

—Leigh Hunt (1784–1859)

Hunt wasn’t greatly known as a British Romantic poet. He wasn’t as proliferate as the others, and didn’t perhaps have as much of a spark in general. Then again, he introduced Keats to Shelley, helping both their careers, and his essays were fairly respected.

Part of my love for this particular poem is due, no doubt, to the fact that my spouse’s name is Jenny.

It will not hurt me when I am old.
A running tide where moonlight burned
will not sting me like silver snakes.
The years will leave me sad and cold;
it is the happy heart that breaks.

The heart asks more than life can give.
When that is learned, then all is learned.
The waves break fold on jeweled fold,
but beauty itself is fugitive.
It will not hurt me when I am old.

—Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)

What can be said about the beautifully painful message of this poem? I could add nothing. But the structure is equally fascinating: the reflection of first and last lines; the single rhyme of “burned” and “learned” that tie the two stanzas together like an oyster shell containing a pearl.

I might only comment:
“inside every pearl / lies buried / an oyster’s torment.”

The Fidelity of Crows

This is the leaving time of year.
Summer shade falls in pieces to the ground
clearing the sky of everything but flight

and discarmined branches, the loyal crows
roosting there. They remain to supply us with choices
other than the stropping of the wind

the fading echoes of geese wings or
the scritch on asphalt of the discarded leaves, some
still fledged in the colors of their death.

—Shelly L. Hall, from Alum

Photo by Klearchos Kapoutsis

Break of Day

Not the rainbow rooster,
but the midnight-feathered crows
crack the sky back,
split the dark like an egg
with their beaks, gaping and

loud.
And that’s why
we call it the break of day,
though it’s more like many
many doors wrenched open
on tight, dry hinges.

Listen
to them gather the last
of night in, strike it
across their beaks, unafraid
of the sparks that snuggle under
their tongues.

Perhaps
they’re signaling the sun,
perhaps they’re calling the secret
nicknames of passing souls,

perhaps they really do know
why one by one they rise
from the slowly igniting branches
a ponderous grace of flight
moving every direction but east.

—Shelly L. Hall (from Alum)

Photo by Daveybot

Today I’m double-focused: looking up answers to my wife’s tax questions about Popcorn Press and Hobby Hearse as she asks them, and finalizing layout and proofing of Alum, a forthcoming, postumous book of poems by my friend Shelly Hall. Here is one of my favorite pieces from the book—heck, one of my favorite pieces ever:

Point of View

My earliest memory of joy
is the sky in my face full
of bright petals of sunlight
rustling in the big maple’s
high branches, clinging there
by the translucent green,
so silly and elated above me.

The earliest memories of you
are always of our house,
its rooms hunched back
well under the eaves,
its air matted with shadow.
In my clearest memories
you always stand away

from the big picture window,
the one place the light can
sneak in, shimmering, playful.
You always stand
where I can never see
both your face and the sky.

—Shelly L. Hall

There’s a good reason for the A E I O U arrangement of English vowels. Say A and the sound is high and at the back of your mouth. Say E and it moves forward. The sequence continues downward and forward until by the time you get to U, the sound is low and front. The same is true whether you’re vocalizing long vowels or short ones.

English being what it is, there are many words that vary only in that vowel sound, words like shape and sheep. Often, you can come up with a full set like taze, tease, ties, toes, twos. Sometimes by swapping the consonants around, you can add additional sets, full or partial, that sound similar—sate, seat, site, suit and stay, sty, stow, stew for example.

Marry that “rhyme scheme” to the standard iambic pentameter of English verse, and you come very close to a sonnet. In this case, it would be a five line opening stanza followed by two quatrains (each one rhyme word away from perfection).

To my ear, the first stanza of such a poem needs to use the full A E I O U sequence, to set the audience’s expectations. Subsequent stanzas may be missing a rhyme or two from the sequence, if there’s no word existing with that specific vowel sound. Or you can use a longer word (perhaps nasty and creosote to fill out the examples above). The final line of the poem pretty much has to end with a U word, or the piece just won’t sound finished.

Enjambment is generally important to keep the “rhyme” from banging its drum too loudly. But that’s not always the case.

I’ve been working in this form quite a bit lately, with some publishing success. The current issue of Verse Wisconsin online includes my single-stanza “Jenny by Moonlight,” for instance, and previous issues of the print magazine have included “Tom Thumb” (in which I “cheat” twice) and “Roman Holiday,” both reprinted below.

Tom Thumb
Like everyone, he owns a welcome mat
to wipe his feet. He hasn’t ever met
the neighbors, doesn’t know whose baseball mitt
lies in the yard, who feeds the midnight tom
prowling the alley, or the brindled mutt
tearing his trash. He’s sure that simple math
means one of these white houses hides a meth
lab. He insists that love’s a myth,
it’s sold like soap, or like a box of moth
balls. He will not be pinned under its thumb.

Roman Holiday
In the Vatican cafeteria, I say,
“Wine in milk cartons? That’s not something you see
back home. Red blood of Christ or white?” You sigh
and take the red, and chide me not to be so
flip. Upstairs in marble chambers old men sue
for holy favors. I say, “Come on, Ace,
we’re on vacation, here to take our ease
along the Forum, eat Italian ice
beside the Coliseum. No one owes
this gilded tomb. Let’s let spumoni ooze
come la lingua on our tongues; refresh our eyes
at Rome’s bright fountains; put our living blood to use.”

Photo by basheertome