Poetry by Jesse Graves
Jesse Graves is the author of five poetry collections, including Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine: Tenth Anniversary Expanded Edition, Basin Ghosts, Specter Mountain, Merciful Days, and the forthcoming A Little Light in the Grave. Mercer University Press published my collection of essays, Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place. My work has received the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South from the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the Philip H. Freund Prize for Creative Writing from Cornell University, as well as two Weatherford Awards from Berea College and the Appalachian Studies Association. He has served as co-editor for several collections of poetry and scholarship, including four volumes of The Southern Poetry Anthology and recently published Complete Poems of James Agee. He is Poet-in-Residence and Professor of English at East Tennessee State University, where he received the 2024 Distinguished Research Award from College of Arts & Sciences.
Sweet Apples in Late Summer
Next to nothing could feel like even less, and that’s what
They had when my father was a boy, on the wrong side
Of the poverty line, yet those long-departed grandparents
Raised nine children and somehow no one starved.
They planted a tree in the back field that grew hard
Sweet apples in late summer and raised melons if seeds
Survived stretches of drought and the digging of moles.
The children wore clothes sewn with different colored
Threads, patched with scraps from old feed bags,
And when they had shoes, they passed them down.
Their grandmother kept them alive, little as she had,
Because keeping children fed had been her life’s work
And she was a Rouse and she would not shirk a job.
Never Measured
My youth? I taste it mostly in the food
I almost never get to eat any more,
recipes passed down through watching
and not through writing or saying:
my mother as a girl standing on a stool
behind her aunt Azalea or her aunt June,
as they sliced delicately peeled tomatoes
into a bowl, seasoned their green beans,
and stirred a mixture of cornbread mash
they would bake into a dressing.
I will drive two and a half hours
over a mountain and through two long
unfolding valleys just for one plate of that
forever receding artistry, the finely sculpted,
never measured, promise of boyhood renewed,
which always ends with something sweet,
and coffee not quite as strong as I make at home,
and my mother, already gathering, even before
I can say thank you, empty dishes, before I can
even imagine how to say thank you.
The Root and the Leaf
The bottom of a leaf upturned for rain
offers one map of eternity—
the root of the oak where it submerges
underground offers another.
Between the root and the leaf, as above
so below, what vast regions hold,
voices from past times spoken here
under the branches hang in air
or deep in the fissures of the bark,
my ears catching only the hum
of a beetle’s wings or the singing
shins of the cricket at work.
Like Eagles
By evening the rain picks up substance,
clicks against windows, glistens car roofs.
Winter seems to go on and on,
yet suddenly the year is over.
If I have been mistreated, I forgive it.
If I have failed to be kind, I hope
some wandering stranger will be kind
for me, do for another what I could not.
Some people want to ride the wind
like eagles on kinetic currents,
some want to skate across sheets of ice
or swim so deep the water goes dark.
My life edges along near the surface,
right up to where the skin radiates
heat out to the rest of the world,
where I grasp it tightly as held breath.
Assists
I passed the best hours of countless days
out there, dribbling down any stray blade
of grass bold enough to sprout on my court.
Mostly I practiced alone, working on moves
my brother taught me, or my uncle,
who could bank a shot from anywhere,
wrap a pass around his back, or thread it
through a defender’s legs, right into the hands
of whoever knew to cut to the basket.
I played out whole college seasons in a week,
Final Four ending with me dropping a three-
pointer for Memphis State to beat Georgetown,
so real I could hear trees shaking in the wind,
clapping and cheering, chanting my name,
and I could only bow to their standing ovation.
Agee: In Memoriam
He rolled a fresh cigarette while the old one
still burned between his clenched lips.
He kept a goat at a rented house in Brooklyn,
St. James Place, where a neighbor painted
“The man who lives here is loony” on his door.
He sometimes wrote 800 words on each side
of a page thin a fly’s wing with a pencil that
was never sharpened, half cursive, half print,
rarely added a date or a title to what he wrote.
To read him now is to feel that your skin
is too tight to contain all your inner turmoil,
that every pretention and pomposity he punctured
somehow belonged also to your subconscious.
Agee was a saint with the devil’s habits.
He brought an east Tennessee way of being
with him to Fortune magazine and long dinners
beside Charlie Chaplin and John Huston.
He died in the backseat of a New York taxi,
age 45, thrice-married, stone broke, his best
work unfinished, soon made famous for the same
suffering that killed him sure as a heart attack.