Jacqueline Osherow has lived in Salt Lake City and taught at the University of Utah – where she is currently Distinguished Professor of English -- for thirty years. She received her B.A. from Harvard in 1978 and her PhD in English and American Literature and Language from Princeton in 1990. She’s the author of eight collections of poetry: Looking for Angels in New York (U of Georgia Press, 1988), Conversations with Survivors (U of Georgia Press, 1994) With a Moon in Transit (Grove, 1996), Dead Men’s Praise (Grove, 1999), The Hoopoe’s Crown (BOA, 2005), Whitethorn (LSU Press, 2011,) Ultimatum from Paradise is (LSU Press, 2014) and My Lookalike at the Krishna Temple (LSU Press, 2019). Osherow has received grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters , as well as a number of prizes from the Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared in many magazines, journals and anthologies, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The Wadsworth Anthology of Poetry, The Longman Anthology of Poetry, Best American Poetry, The Norton Anthology of Jewish-American Literature, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Twentieth Century American Poetry and The Making of a Poem. She’s Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Utah.
Works
Inspiration Point, Bryce Canyon, Utah
Inspiration Point, Bryce Canyon, Utah
Maybe it was just for this that God pulled
water from dry land: to rescue hoodoo
after hoodoo. That’s what they’re called ---
a bastardization of voodoo --
these unrepeatable needles of rock,
geology’s answer to flakes of snow.
A sound enough hypothesis: dark magic.
But I like God’s approach – so straightforward:
the light, the land, the sky, each feat of handiwork
a matter of a single uttered word
(that’s the first version; the clumsy second
was more hand’s on, with dust and ribs required)
though it’s a stretch to claim this place was planned.
Maybe, just like us, God was stupefied;
He rarely knew how any day would end,
had to see things finished to call them good.
Here, He might even have done without
the bric-a-brac of the days that followed
except the fourth day’s (bodies of light)
essential for the colors of the stone,
the greater light especially adroit.
Just watch it nurse a puny flame at dawn
-- purple with an edging of vermillion –
by sunrise to a full-fledged conflagration
then temper it to golden-rose by noon,
darker still as day begins to fail.
The oranges go bronze, the reds, maroon,
the whole place solid indigo by nightfall,
except on nights when a full or near-full moon
applies its inlay– mother-of-pearl
on a lamina of coral and carnelian –
or the moon’s a no-show, no stone visible,
just black on black, spikes and spires gone.
That’s when you look up: the sky’s Grand Central
(no light pollution; no clouds; conditions ideal),
rush hour’s hubbub irresistible,
the stars its thronged commuters, check by jowl.
The Park has telescopes (I once saw Jupiter)
but I prefer an open free-for-all,
the peripheral inkling of a meteor
(or was that an satellite?) or diving owl.
Some flora and fauna did make their way here
eventually, swashbucklers all:
Rattlesnake. Manzanita. Prickly pear,
its shock of blossoms at the end of April
slow-motion fireworks, the canyon floor
lost beneath magentas, yellows, reds
or bristle-cone pine, launching spectacular
high-wire acrobatics off the cliff sides,
where that gifted horticulturist,
the nuthatch, a glutton for its seeds,
disseminates them when it stops to rest –
quite ingenious of God, if oddly fanciful
for so inveterate a fatalist,
that is, if God’s mixed up in this at all.
The Park prefers the Piutes’ explanation:
the hoodoos were once the legend people
shape shifters, native to this region,
turned for some unnamable transgression
by vigilant Coyote into stone,
their face-paint still intact, their tradition
of shape-shifting now upheld in unison,
a nonstop frenzy of dissimulation:
now a storm-tossed, now a tranquil, ocean
flocked by scarlet ibis, pink flamingos,
now dreamscape, now valley of the moon,
now ransacked cathedrals’ lost rose windows
now an amphitheater’s hushed proscenium,
now leafless aspens, elms, catalpas, willows
now phantom hollyhock, delphinium,
now flashback, now panicked premonition,
now truce, now skirmish, now pandemonium,
now parachutes (a daredevil battalion
floating toward an ill-fated attack)
now blushing debutantes (their first cotillion)
now parched oasis, now bivouac,
close by each golden tent a golden torch,
now red-robed Russian choirs, now ecstatic
ovations from thick stands of golden birch,
now burnished temple, now tarnished city,
now bands of acolytes – in mosque, in church
or here, assembling legends of Coyote –
scrambling to get down on their untried knees
and thank someone – anyone -- for all this beauty,
though maybe it’s the frost they ought to praise,
the real creator, according to science,
how it would melt and freeze, melt and freeze
and then, in a matter of mere eons
(no wind involved, windy as it is),
chisel what must be earth’s most flimsy stone –
limestone, siltstone, mudstone—into this.
Not surprising, really, when you think what frost
can achieve, in seconds, on a pane of glass –
always a revelation, when a miniaturist
takes his genius for precision large-scale:
the landscape behind the Mystic Lamb as Christ
in the Ghent altarpiece, for example,
an exhaustive primer of floral specimens,
rendered in botanical detail,
art both mainstay and intimate of science –
think Leonardo – and science of art.
What fools we were to leave the Renaissance
behind us, to tear ourselves apart
into more and more obscure specialization.
Not that it matters here. Science and art,
even in conjunction with their on-again
off-again confederate, religion,
are speechless in the presence of this canyon.
Even God needs two versions of Creation
at the start of Genesis. Some things defy
a single overarching explanation.
Maybe everything does, if you look carefully.
And what’s a day exactly, when the sun
hasn’t yet been added to the sky?
That third day might still go going on,
everything I’m staring at still raw,
God on overdrive, the frost a madman,
consumed by each imaginary flaw.
Am I a witness? An alibi? A spy?
And what’s this delirium? this terror? this awe?
Is the sky hallucinating? Am I?
Inspiration Point, Bryce Canyon, Utah
Just let me stand here with an open eye.
Spring Arrives Late to Salt Lake City
Spring Arrives Late to Salt Lake City
Why so hesitant, spring? What’s the problem?
I’ve never known you quite this shy.
You’re like a new girl in junior high,
avoiding the hallways, the lunch room,
strangely oblivious of your own beauty
or perhaps afraid of it, keeping it hidden.
But what’s happening? All of a sudden
you’re trying prom dresses on all over the city,
absurdly poufy pinks, whites, purple-reds,
yards and yards of crinoline beneath each skirt.
And now you’re tearing them up! Exquisite shreds
cover streets, cars, sidewalks, rooftops, grass. . . .
You’re back to all or nothing, spring. I’m envious.
I aimed to be like that, but I lost heart.
Moonrise, Salt Lake City: December 26, 2015
Moonrise, Salt Lake City: December 26, 2015
It looks, for all the world, like the holy ghost
in an early Renaissance annunciation:
a light-struck, light-emitting dove in flight.
But there’s no Mary. No Gabriel. It’s night;
the moon’s taking a necessary breather,
a bit too out of shape to slither past
this mountain I hadn’t seen was here,
its outlines newly visible as wings
(what’s showing of the moon itself’s the head).
Don’t worry, moon; we all lose our bearings.
You don’t have to rise. Stay here instead.
I’ll spot you; we could both use an ally
and rumor has it disorientation
is the least resistant pathway to what’s holy.
Hearing News from the Temple Mount in Salt Lake City
Hearing News from the Temple Mount in Salt Lake City
You know that conversation
in the elevator in the Catskills:
how one woman says, Oy,
the food here is so terrible
and the other and the portions
are so small? It’s a variant
on Jacob’s line to Pharaoh
when he gets to Egypt —few
and evil have been the days
of my life. Naturally, he’s our
chosen namesake: this Israel
the Torah keeps forgetting and
calling Jacob, as if it doesn’t
trust his cleaned-up name. . . ..
Obviously he’s the perfect
guy for us — we’re always
willing to take something
over nothing — hence
our lunatic attachment
to that miserable pinpoint
in the desert, where now,
whether it’s Ishmael
or Isaac on the altar,
there’s an earsplitting
crowd working to drown
out every angel until
Abraham fulfills his sacrifice.
It’s none of my diaspora-
befuddled business, but
I’m not in the mood
to celebrate. Call me
thin-skinned, but I can’t
get used to the idea that
all these hordes of people
wish me dead. You have
to remember: I’m Jacob’s
offspring; I want as many
evil days as I can lay my
hands on . . . Thank God
I live in Salt Lake City. Who’s
going to come looking for me
here? In this calm Zion,
where a bunch of blonde
mishuginers think they’re
the chosen people of God.
Good luck to them is all
I have to say; let them
get the joy from it that I do.
Bibliography
- Looking for Angels in New York, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1988.
- Conversations with Survivors, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1994.
- With a Moon in Transit, Grove (New York, NY), 1996.
- Dead Men’s Praise, Grove (New York), 1999.
- The Hoopoe’s Crown, BOA Editions, Ltd. (Rochester, NY), 2005.
- Whitethorn, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 2011.
- Ultimatum from Paradise, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 2014.
- My Lookalike at the Krishna Temple, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge), 2019.
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