There was a merry-go-round
with fantastic animals
like ostriches and seahorses
instead of ponies,
and music that vibrated
down my arms when I clutched
the silver pole in front of me.
It was like waking up
on the other side of a dream.
One day the organ suddenly stopped playing.
I was left with plunging creatures
who made no sound,
and a golden swan
whose outstretched wings
bore me round silently
as I watched my parents' faces
draw closer, then away,
closer, and away.
© Jami Wolf, 1996
You remember,
it was the summer it got so hot
we filled the tub from the cold tap
and took turns lying in it, one of us
sighing in the cool water, the other
cursing and sweating in the next room.
No one we knew had a job. Old people died
in their downtown apartments
when the temperature pushed 105.
Even at night, the lights shimmered
with sidewalk heat, and no one moved fast
or had anywhere to go. We forgot about love--
just the thought of all that sweat
making a little river down your spine.
So wasn't it July? right in the worst
of it, when the three women stepped
out the front door of the First Chattanooga
Lift Jesus Up Church, one of them still humming
a little phrase from Take Me, Lord,
to That Mountain, the other two
commenting on the heat--Oh Lord,
such heat! You can't hardly draw breath,
can't stand to put a hat on your head,
and don't even speak to me about stockings--
when a car burned by, a shotgun out the window.
On TV news, the same phrase repeated:
three black women shot
in the legs for nothing.
The riots started that night,
even spread to Atlanta and Knoxville.
It was cool again
when people started to forget,
the leaves about to turn on Lookout Mountain.
We were gone by then, but I could feel when it happened:
the first green leaf turning
red, then dropping on a breeze
into a bend of the Tennessee.
© Jami Wolf, 1996
Published in Excursus.
I remember windless afternoons
drinking wine from coffee mugs,
we'd watch for alligators in the lake,
the eye and nostril that barely broke
the surface, the monster shadow
of the body beneath.
We played backgammon in bed
every night. The fat beetles smacked
the lighted window like popcorn.
We fried pork chops, ate them
with applesauce and canned corn.
Nights out, we swallowed raw
oysters with Saltines and beer.
There were times we both fell
asleep on the long drive back from town,
the car muttering into a ditch.
And I remember how, making the bus trip
back from the beach, you stood
over a little boy riding alone,
and when the boy fell asleep, leaned over
and took the bobbing head in your hand,
carefully held it all the way to St. Pete.
© Jami Wolf, 1996
My poems have appeared most recently in Excursusmagazine and the Coffeehouse
Poetry Anthology.
I work as a technical writer and live with my husband and baby daughter in Laguna
Niguel, California.
Email me at jamiw@ix.netcom.com
Poems and page © Jami Wolf, 1996 Page layout and design by Scott Reid Serkes.
Last updated: October 25, 1998 by Diane Kirsten-Martin