Joel Peckham Jr.
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Joel Peckham Jr. published seven books of poetry and nonfiction, most recently Bone Music (SFAU), Body Memory (New Rivers), and the spoken word LP, Still Running: Words and Music by Joel Peckham (EAT poems). Individual poems and essays have appeared recently in or are forthcoming Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, The Sugar House Review, Cave Wall, and The Beloit Poetry Journal. With Robert Vivian, he recently edited an anthology of ecstatic poetry for New Rivers Press, titled Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in American Poetry and Prose.
Any Moonwalker Can Tell You (or, Earth to Joel)
1.
how it feels when silence means you might be a drift.
On your own out there in space. And I think how much
fear can be conveyed in the cutting of a cord. How fragile
we can be in the absence of a corresponding voice or even
a dial-tone, silence an open mouth a swallowing that lets
you know that something’s coming and what’s coming can’t be
good. Hello? Hello? I have learned there are
questions I don’t want the answers to. Joel, I know you are
confused. That’s the drugs. You’re at Kings hospital. There was
an accident, Joel. Darius is going to be ok. But Susie and Cyrus.
They didn’t make it, Joel. And so I am always
speaking across the void and having to fill the silence on my
own to find the right words and have them at the ready as if a
word could speak the capsule through the atmosphere
bring a body back through the windshield piece the
glass together like a memory that leaves your hands stinging
with blood.
2.
My mother calls in the middle of the night, We had an
accident, Jo, saying you have to talk to your father
who is in the hospital in Brockton after falling down the stairs
again but thinks he is somewhere else and wants to go
home, swears there’s nothing wrong with him or his
brain. I’m only 45 he says, too young to be living like
this. And suddenly, in this moment, I am
older than my father I am my father’s father and somehow
still his son only I am 14 and he’s saying Joel,
are you still with me as I stare straight though or past him or
out the window slack jawed, spacing out, a space
cadet, the way I sometimes did and do when too
many things converge connect overwhelm
shoosh-of-tires-heater’s-hum-siren-song-lyric-guitar-solo-drums-
red-sox-game-gull-cry-jet-hornblare-ticking-of-a-turning-signal-
mosquito-buzz-breath-last-two-lines-of-a-poem:
his impatient Joel? an error code on an alarm Joel
Joel?
A crack in that glass cathedral: that silence that is sound
static white noise my name a question which was and is
always somewhere in my head. And ready to go
off. You there, kid? Earth to Joel. I don’t know how
3.
to respond. I am everywhere and nowhere. Each moment
calling to another as if they are embedded in each other: the
first son in the second, marriage within marriage, father in
son. Times I have called them by wrong names: Susie/Rachael,
Cyrus/Darius. Each word each step a motion forward dragging
loss along and out in front. Maybe
time has no meaning on the surface of the moon.
Or maybe it is all you have, all that matters. Time
measured in oxygen in fuel in heartbeats in the
distance between call
and response. Or maybe it’s all one moment in the way that
Dylan said it’s all one song that to compose is just a
matter of pulling it gently down from wherever it’s floating
up there unthreading it from a skyful of notes of
seconds strung like constellated stars on the surface of an
ocean like plucking the flightpath of a
bird from a flock. The journey of a leaf torn free from a storm.
Which may be to say there is no silence not where
there is life. Once,
4.
by a lake on a mountain in the heat of summer I lost
Darius. Which is to say he was there and then there was a crowd
and then he was not anywhere I could find him. That no
one there with me, even Rachael seemed to know where
he was or had an answer to Where is my son?! no matter how
frantic the repetition was, increasing in volume and pitch
WHERE is my son?! Where is my SON?! And here I
could try to tell you what it’s like to “lose” a child and to be
lost to him to wake up in a hospital to find him
gone and wonder
if he is somewhere out there a drift calling my name
because I know that silence too. Silence as a
waiting for response. Darius
was found that day, though still I wake sometimes in the dark,
shouting Where is my son? And Rachael frightened, and silent,
hand reaching out but waiting not knowing how to
ask Which one?
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