Dr. Jeffrey Thomson
Click on the "Archive" button above to return to the Features archives
Jeffrey Thomson's second collection of poems, The Country of Lost Sons, inaugurated a new poetry series from Parlor Press at Purdue University in February 2004. His third book of poems, Renovation, will be part of the Carnegie Mellon University Press poetry series in 2005. His first book, The Halo Brace, was brought out in a limited edition letterpress version from Birch Brook Press in 1998.
His most recent book is an artist's book/short poem sequence called Blind Desire published by Dionysus Press. Printed in a limited edition in English and Braille and featuring the photographs of Dennis Marsico, Blind Desire is part of a trilogy of books published for the left-perimeter of the exhibit Messages and Communications at the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh.
Other poems of his have been awarded a 2005 Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and won the Masters Poetry Contest and the Academy of American Poets Prize on three occasions. He has also been awarded a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers Conference and a Writers @ Work fellowship for his poetry. He received his PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Missouri in 1996 and in an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Those that are trained
The dog behind the fence is a symbol
for desire, for the anywhere-but-here grit
on the teeth found up the endless swerve
of river road high at the end of the valley.
The torn paneling, creased as tar
in the den, where the blue suede
from the small black and white
fills the room and the only channel
on this late is a gospel station
where a preacher whispers and sweats
then gut punches a man whose cancer
has returned, the paneling says something
too about desire as the room
goes gravel-colored with smoke,
the remains of a dimebag on the mirror
on the table. But now I want to
leave them here, these two boys
who might be you and me, these boys
made up of memory and ash and smoke,
these two boys who have the TV sound
turned down and Dark Side cranked
again and the alarms are detonating
and the bells and the clock tick-tocks
like a damaged heart and it all seems
at once easy and impossible because
the road down the valley is the only road
to everywhere as the dog barks and barks
and will never, ever, shut the fuck up
Those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush
It's not what you think, not matted mohair
shaved from the gamy flank. And Mr. Camel,
the inventor, not named for the harelip,
for the split-toes, for the god awful smell
and the knees swollen as breadfruit.
Not ata Allah -God's gift - with its boat-
rolling gait. Not the ropey tail.
Not a definition by negation, the logic
of denial used to approach the essence
of what is. Rather, it's the ox or the goat,
squirrel or pony, carcasses abandoned
for the delicacy of a caress. Remains
as in affirmation, as in a man stroking
the cheek bones of his telescope's mirror
on the high balcony, the city painted up around him
like the caves at Lascaux, the tinted bulls
in ocher and carmine, the bird-headed man
scorched in cinnamon and the swimming stags.
True stars extinct in the city, the night sky gone
the color of sun-baked asphalt, and a welter
of traffic rivering beneath his feet,
he watches a man and a woman undress
each other down the barrel of 3rd Avenue,
their several shadows burned onto the wall
as with the delicacy of a camel's hair brush.
