Jessy Randall

Of Course

“[Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns] were more than friends, of course; they were deeply involved with one another, both intellectually and emotionally, and the intensity of what passed between them filled up their life.”
—Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time (Picador, 2005).

The stars in the night sky, of course, are sometimes
planets. The planets are sometimes comets. Of course
the comets are sometimes airplanes. Or pieces of dust,
glinting a reflection from your flashlight and 
making your eyes water.

Why I Had Children

Because I was reading too many books and getting too much
sleep and my self-esteem was too high.Because I needed to
be taken down a peg. Because I thought love was one thing
and really it’s another. Because I thought I knew everything
about everything and I didn’t know anything, not anything
in the world.

Your Seventh Grade Secret Admirer

I didn’t admire you and I
wasn’t very secret about it.
I wrote to you, all those notes on
lined yellow paper. I signed
“Mysty” and “Someone” and
“Your Secret Admirer.” I
wanted you to find me out.
How I felt about you was a lot,
confused, one way one day
and another way next week.
It wasn’t admiration. It was
a kind of pre-lust, a physical
ache for something unknown.

Cleaning the Closet

You are not like the boys who loved me
in high school. They wrote
such impassioned letters to me
in physics class, and then in math
confessed they could not go on. You
are barely there; you wait, just
below the surface, in someone else’s
handwriting. You did not exist then,
and therefore you did not attend any
of my six voice recitals, the programs
lined up on the table now like a list
of proofs that you were not there.

At this one I sang “My Lovely Celia.”
At this one I sang “Orpheus With His Lute.”
At this one I sang “Shenandoah.”

The toss-out pile grows like a pregnant teenager
so that I can fit my past into our new home.