Lowell Jaeger
All poems, I feel, are epistolary in as much as they are letters to the world.At times my poems are letters to a specific person; holding the addressee in mind sets the poem’s tone in the same way one tailors one’s conversation to best fit a specific listener. At times my poems address the anonymous world, messages in bottles floating across the waters, awaiting readership. One hopes these poems will fall into the right hands.
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Anniversary Letter
I fell in love with you again
while parked outside a liquor store
along the highway winding through
the Canadian Rockies. We’d stopped
to pick out a bottle of wine,
anticipating romance in the hotel that night.
But the liquor store was closed,
and I’d locked the keys in the truck,
my wallet on the seat beside your purse and phone.
We stood on the empty street, feeling daylight
fade, a chill dropping
from the snow-covered peaks. Our hotel
still a couple hour’s drive beyond us.
Eventually I would pry a narrow window
in back of the cab. You would squeeze through,
tearing your shorts and scraping your shins.
In the dark, a wrong turn would mislead us
miles out of our way, and we’d arrive blurry-eyed,
stupefied to discover our hotel
had no vacancy and no record of our reservation.
Through hard times and wayward places,
I fell in love with you again
in a wayside where we huddled
in the truck, dozing, waking fitfully
to eighteen-wheelers jake breaking on the pass,
you keeping one hand or both in mine all night long.
Note to Self:
How This Very Rocking Chair You're Sitting In Came to Be
The left rocker you lifted from inside a sagebrush
where someone had stabbed it upright to mark
the trail. You'd have pitched it aside after rubbing
the raised grain of weathered oak in your palm, testing
the strength of its curve against your thigh,
but spied the right rocker and some cross-members
under a giant saguaro a hundred paces farther on.
You were out of water; didn't know your way back
and didn’t know where your way forward would lead.
And the woman with you would soon be your wife,
though neither of you knew that. She trusted you
as much as she could—which wasn't much—
and the reason she kept asking as if the answer
should change: "Are you sure? Are you sure?"
If you'd been old as now you would have turned,
said simply, "Hell no, I'm lost as anybody else."
But you were young enough to nod, jut your chin,
puff your chest while your knees trembled
beneath your true heart's doomsday boom.
You scooped up pieces of that chair—rockers, hand-
turned cross-members—and carried them with you as proof
you gambled on living by gumption to reconstruct
this ruined rocking chair some busted pioneer
must have once upon a bad day abandoned there.
Ah, a few crazy dance steps to the left and right—
two tall poles to form the back of the rocker, six
slats. Elbow rest here, there. Better than an armload.
And she refused to help with a single stick of it,
even though you weren't on the trail you thought,
but one something like it, so you both survived.
Married less than a year later. All those pieces
you assembled in the basement back home,
sanding, gluing, varnishing. Learned to cane
the seat—sent away for the instructions—softened
the bands of cane in the tub, one-by-one wrapped
the cross-members, stitching each loop with thread
to hold them snug as long as they might last.
They lasted longer than your marriage. You still
own that rocker. Your wife went to pieces
eventually. You've vowed—an older, wiser you—
should you stumble on her scattered remains,
you'll leave them bleaching where they lay.
"Hell," you'll shout into a hot blast out of nowhere,
"Nothing's much for sure." Then you'll march on
the way you've always been headed, even so.
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Lowell Jaeger teaches creative writing at Flathead Valley Community College in Kalispell, Montana. As founding editor of Many Voices Press, he compiled Poems Across the Big Sky, an anthology of Montana poets, and New Poets of the American West, an anthology of poets from 11 Western states. His third collection of poems, Suddenly Out of a Long Sleep (Arctos Press) was published in 2009 and was a finalist for the Paterson Award. His fourth collection, WE, (Main Street Rag Press) was published in 2010. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Montana Arts Council and winner of the Grolier Poetry Peace Prize. Most recently Jaeger was awarded the Montana Governor’s Humanities Award for his work in promoting thoughtful civic discourse.