Elizabeth Jacobson

Mountains Hidden in Mountains

Always my right side tugging me on,

my right eye weeping,

the furious liver, shouting.

Always a rising,

a mountain inside a mountain.

Always an uproar

above the mountain.

The full moon

pulling everything through.

Always the vacancy.

I promised to be naked,

to walk on my knees up the mountain

and if the mountain doubts me,

I promise to take more off.

Perfectly Made

Northern Flicker you woke me from dark sleep, your head

slammed into my window, neck snapped as you dropped

to the frozen ground. I had been dreaming of Gettysburg,

can you imagine? Our fathers brought forth a new nation,

conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal.

So perfectly made, I put my nail between the split of your beak, pulled

out the long worm of your tongue as if it were a measuring tape

coming out of its case, let go and watched it coil back, then my fingers

in your spotted under-down, a marvel, so warm,

so warm, in the bitter morning; I felt history

toying with itself as I stretched your stiffening wings

as far as they would spread and plucked out the stunning

bright orange tail feathers, one after the next, each quill spilling

a black ichorous ink onto my palms.

Here is a Pilgrim on a Waterless Shore:

A month before spring,

the first day of spring arrives.

She cannot stop breathing in the scent of cold fresh water

where there isn’t any water,

the smell of flowers

that haven’t appeared.

She takes off her arms,

her legs,

unwinds her head,

tucks them into the compost with her breath.

Within minutes she can see the star-shaped leaves of the delphinium

stir under the mulch,

their shoots coiling around her wrists,

pulling her in.

A woman practicing for death

in the waking green undergrass of her life.

She has never lost an eye or a finger,

or even much bone.

She has not been splayed and sliced open,

arranged on a giant Styrofoam tray

by a man whose bathroom is strung with human heads.

Now a buttery swallowtail lands on her arm,

the sleek black V at the end of its body a pulse

that offers her a shudder.

How possible it is to speak of something treasured

as we watch it appear.

An eagle is silent while it circles its prey,

as it pulls apart a rabbit under the moonlight

leaving the insides, leaving the white tail on the earth.

The liquid bark of her runs down her throat,

out a hole at the bottom of a foot.

It is the way of things to empty what is too full.

In a month, honeybees will drink from her neck,

the plump yellow part of their bodies

hidden under furry black pollen from oriental poppies.

Each night a battle

a wail

one owl screeching from its same

and different self

uuuuup uuuuup uuuuup.

Just after daybreak rain pours down from the sky in the distance

as if it were lengths of long gray hair at the back of a woman’s head,

while I am opening throat for muggy breath,

facing forward into a sliding door that is not closed,

waiting for the sky to shake its head over my little plot of comfort.

At the top of the ponderosa

a gift of tail feathers,

more orange-tipped than red-tailed hawk,

spiral down

while in the garden a yellow breasted finch hooks feet

into the top of a finished sunflower head,

bobs for seeds as the sunflower head sways back and forth.

The finch’s mate lands on her back,

jumps up and down as the flower head wrenches frantically,

forward and back, back and forward,

loses his balance and quickly

flies off,

his little drip of seed seeping like a nap into the layers of her down.

How long does it take to wreck the good things we are given?

Not long, it turns out.

A dog dies in a few days without water,

we can go on longer,

eat grass like a horse without throwing it up,

scratch in the dirt for grubs,

fold the giant gilded self in half like a piece of paper,

and then into quarters,

and then into eights

all the time praying

open, open,

another soft word for you will disintegrate anyway.

Sometimes when things come fast,

they are at their best,

though you don’t know this until later.

There are just twenty elements that make up who we are,

and if I were to list them all,

some of you would stop reading,

while others would go on with great interest.

Four elements are composed from the air and sixteen from the earth.

Like a stray dog, a dragonfly followed me home from the pond today,

and now he is circling overheard,

the extra-large size of this one casting dragonfly shadows on the driveway like an aircraft.

If you were propelled into the center of the galaxy

and your sense of smell was still intact,

it would be familiar;

the scent of the universe is a raspberry and rum cocktail!

I would like to see the rare Cockerell bumblebees,

that have appeared in the White Mountains after 58 years.

if not in the tall pine forest,

then inside my breast.

I cannot explain the brown spotted moth

with the fin on its back like a shark,

or pale blue flowers blooming from sideways stalks,

stunning in their strange mutative quality.

The heat of the world feels good on my arms as I hold them out for hours,

a dead branch in one hand --

a calmcrow,

a bird perch.

A black phoebe sidesteps almost to my wrist,

as I watch what is alone in this world turn into a ring of stones

around a single flowering desert daisy.

Do you know what’s going on in there

deep down in the earth of the liver,

the canyons of the gut?

This world,

we call it world, but it is no world,

no realm of gold –

just red dirt,

dust existing as particles of light.

Early this morning, I couldn’t help but touch the two mating earthworms

as thick as my thumb.

Entwined, the end of one pumping its juice

into the gonadal opening of the other.

But my finger ruined their ecstasy,

and they sucked themselves back into their holes,

each one male and female,

each one soft and wide

from so much rain,

from so much sex.

It takes courage to be still,

to wait in the dark for nothing.

I pluck my hairs and shine my breasts,

sit in the center of the green spring lawn without moving a finger or a toe.

The magpies shriek at each other

high above in the ancient cherry tree,

a long married couple,

fighting over the few remaining cherries.

One of their blue feathers,

dislodged in this squabble,

lands on my knee.

Most species on this planet don’t even see us,

or know that we are here.

And when they disappear

we easily find something else to hunt.

There is white fur from a rabbit’s tail

caught in the splintery pine border of the vegetable bed,

meaning the hawk has had its way again.

I couldn’t help but touch the mating earthworms.

It has to do with bliss,

which for me is the tips of my fingers on something more porous than myself.

I woke early this morning to the screams of a terrified cat

as it was being pulled apart

by a pack of coyotes,

howling with glee as they wolfed it down.

The crickets, who had been up all night,

were still rubbing their wings against each other,

exploding with want.

Later, on the nature hike,

we are told that every part of the daylily is edible,

and handed a freshly pulled petal to eat.

Some bees are territorial and nudge

other bees away but they don’t fight.

Some bees live in hives and work together,

while others are solitary,

wall-papering their nests with the petals of flowers.

At the edge of the hummingbird feeder,

which hangs from a thin crabapple branch,

a praying mantis lays in wait just above the spout,

attacks the next ruby throated

that comes to drink,

wrapping its long front arms

around the hummingbird’s neck like two mini pythons.

The bird whines like a puppy

as the praying mantis takes bites out of the flesh

from the side of its head.

The mantis would have eaten the entire hummingbird alive,

as he batted his lime green wings futilely,

or died of a heart attack,

but the nature guide flicked the insect off the bird with his rolled up hat.

In the copper birdbath,

tiny hoverflies are sucking the head of a drowned white moth.

I bend down close,

their shiny orange bodies almost to my lips.

We call it sky, I say to them,

but to itself it is an interminable beginning.

A hawk leaves the wet clay insides of its prey on the soil,

also the nails of a foot,

a small rat’s nose.

Here is a pilgrim on a waterless shore looking toward the ground for reflection.

What rises up are the countless things

that have come together to produce this giant radish,

or a row of corn planted 18 inches into the earth.

To wake each day not knowing where I will go

returning,

not knowing where I have been

is the prayer we each walk with.

Plea of hummingbird basket

open sphere of moss and bits of lichen, every strand tucked in with precision,

a chalice growing out of the thin branch of a Russian olive, brimming this morning with dew

wrung from a moonless night sky.

A common whitetail dragonfly

his abdomen dipped in liquid chalk,

sunlight passing through the gossamer wings

turns the black lattice work to orange,

a female on a dead pine branch warms herself in the sun

is taken unaware by this aggressive male

their bodies curling into a heart

as they stretch and bend toward instinct.

Above a black-chinned hummingbird flies in a horizontal line

the violet patina around his throat

shimmers as he dives toward the mating pair,

snatches the male in his beak.

Busy with its own longing, a desert honeysuckle

stretches its vine toward the sun

its flaming petals shrivel in the heat

as desire rushes through the sandy loam

but not into the blossoms and not into the air.

Ecstasy comes in lengthier moments now,

comes when I call it,

and comes when I don’t.

A single thinning cloud disintegrating across this steely sphere of sky.

The one tree standing

a little higher than the rest on the ridge of a mountain,

in the distance.

Last night a clothes moth landed in my hair

and laid her web of eggs close to my scalp.

By morning, her body, a golden powder,

had spread across one of my eyelids like shadow.

Most of the time I feel the non-linearity of things

but still I sense a line trying to draw me in,

tempting me as if it were the snake charmer and I its curving form;

but so curious to go against its nature,

so wanting to straighten out.

Here is a finger pushing itself into hot wax.

Here is a tongue putting its tip

on a gritty stone.

Here is a sharp knife cutting ever so slightly

into the thinnest part of a wrist.

What I continue to count on is flux;

still, there is something that does not move.

Every night a hawk. Every day,

another set of rabbit innards

left behind on the ground.

I can’t help myself,

like a child

I find the nearest stick and turn them over,

the prize being a slithering nest of maggots,

the flesh eaten through until the larvae on the bare grass become flies.

I thought it would be harder,

to break the identity with the body,

with the mind,

but as it turns out, all I have to do is open my eyes,

and keep them empty.

The night the moon came for me she was not her usual womanly self,

but rather a mannish intensity in a navy suit,

taking a firm grip on my wrist.

If you wake and come with me now, he said, you will have a taste of what is enough.

Still, I knew I might want more,

and then more:

that enigmatic joy of aloneness.

I understood that I would not be going back to sleep.

By the door, the red bucket was full of water

and a black lizard filled the space with its swimming form.

I have seen a garter snake giving birth in the yard.

The eggshells had dissolved already in her body

six writhing and wet licorice whip babies came out.

If you fall asleep curled around the hole of a black-tailed prairie dog

you will wake craving such broadleaf forbs as wild petunia, and sunflower.

If you fall asleep in a culvert under a narrow dirt highway

your body will vanish by morning.

The night the moon came for me I was ready to go.

I touched the long antennae of the pine sawyer,

and fed it drops of spit from my fingertip while it sat on the edge of the silver porch chair,

a vagabond at rest.

Words, I told him, are what I had been given to gnaw on,

but they aren’t enough.

They just are not enough.

So I open my mouth for timber and steel,

and those jagged pieces of mountain that tumble down onto the road

and block the way.

Hour of Lead

When you are by the sea on an island made mostly of cement

When in the morning there are no mourning doves susurrating in the strangler figs

No grackles raucously settling down in palm crowns at nightfall

When a brown anole fans its red dewlap defending its territory of pavers

And another crawls out from under a pile of moldering Brazilian Beauty Leaf leaves,

a greasy black tail sprout growing from its broken stub

When a cormorant dives for young snook in the bay then comes up empty-beaked,

trembles on a rusty culvert to spread and dry its ceremonious wings

Where the mangrove forest is no longer a forest no longer an oyster grove,

your raft no longer banked in its dense cabled roots

Because some days you feel incremental disaster in each second,

which inflames the mind like grit in an eye

Because on these days, you are like a tongue cut from a mouth

Because on these days you know you will never be empty enough

You lie on the hot brick patio and sweat, your weighty limbs soften into the sinking mortar

You stare and stare at a blistering sky

When finally, having reached the very bottom, that place where self-absorption is flawless

There springs a wondrous moment, like a trap that has unhinged:

And you feel a slight coil of return— a slight lifting

Which you recognize as your species’ uncanny ability to imagine buoyancy,

where there isn’t any,

As if this will cure one failure of the self after another.

This poem was originally published in Lana Turner and is forthcoming in There are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral, Parlor Press/Free Verse Editions, (c) 2025 by Parlor Press. Used by permission. “Hour of Lead” is Emily Dickinson’s phrase.

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