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.
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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.
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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.
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