WEEKEND RUBRICS: 5/31/26
May, June, July
SOME JOY: Jamall May and May Swenson
THERE ARE BIRDS HERE
by Jamall May
For Detroit
There are birds here,
so many birds here
is what I was trying to say
when they said those birds were metaphors
for what is trapped
between buildings
and buildings. No.
The birds are here
to root around for bread
the girl’s hands tear
and toss like confetti. No,
I don’t mean the bread is torn like cotton,
I said confetti, and no
not the confetti
a tank can make of a building.
I mean the confetti
a boy can’t stop smiling about
and no his smile isn’t much
like a skeleton at all. And no
his neighborhood is not like a war zone.
I am trying to say
his neighborhood
is as tattered and feathered
as anything else,
as shadow pierced by sun
and light parted
by shadow-dance as anything else,
but they won’t stop saying
how lovely the ruins,
how ruined the lovely
children must be in that birdless city.
###
Another poet named May - May Swenson - wrote that the experience of poetry is “based in a craving to get through the curtains of things as they appear, to things as they are, and then into the larger, wilder space of things as they are becoming. This ambition involves a paradox: an instinctive belief in the senses as exquisite tools for this investigation and, at the same time, a suspicion about their crudeness.”
She added: “The poet, tracing the edge of a great shadow whose outline shifts and varies, proving there is an invisible moving source of light behind, hopes (naively, in view of his ephemerality) to reach and touch the foot of that solid whatever-it-is that casts the shadow. If sometimes it seems he does touch it, it is only to be faced with a more distant, even less accessible mystery. Because all is movement—all is breathing change.”
Poet Grace Schulman said of her, “Questions are the wellspring of May Swenson’s art ... In her speculations and her close observations, she fulfills Marianne Moore’s formula for the working artist: ‘Curiosity, observation, and a great deal of joy in the thing.’”
This poem by Swenson, that’s her above, appeared in the March 25, 1972, issue of The New Yorker:
THE PURE SUIT OF HAPPINESS
The pure suit of happiness,
not yet invented. How I long
to climb into its legs,
fit into its sleeves, and zip
it up, pull the hood
over my head. It’s got
a face mask, too, and gloves
and boots attached. It’s
made for me. It’s blue. It’s
not too heavy, not too
light. It’s my right.
It has its own weather,
which is youth’s breeze,
equilibrated by the ideal
thermostat of maturity,
and built in, to begin with,
fluoroscopic goggles of
age. I’d see through
everything, yet be happy.
I’d be suited for life. I’d
always look good to myself.[TO READ AND VIEW THE REMAINING RUBRICS THIS WEEKEND, PLEASE JOIN OUR PAID SUBSCRIBER COMMUNITY FOR ONLY $5 A MONTH OR $50 A YEAR. THANKS. IT MEANS A LOT.]