Jennifer Arin


Reasons for Being an Emperor on Horseback

To cut through forested darkness
with a penetrating spear, find my way 
through this terrain I navigate;
to clear a path through the expanse, 
chase away ghosts and demons 
from the heavy, hanging branches; 
ride swift
from where I am to where
I wish: take in
the shaded world ahead.



Love Poem for the Larger Scheme of Things

I need a new hill
to roll down, or another 
tree for this geography,
rough-skinned limbs to shinny up, 
branches reaching out like words 
spoken at the Wash Time Launderette. 
A Russian woman suggests I set
the temperature higher.  I understand 
as best I can she had to leave
the Ukraine, a new settlement
of tears beneath her eyes.  We fold 
each other’s sheets, match corners, 
and turning the edges
of a page in the journal for Chris,
I have that same sense of something 
missing needlessly.  It carries
little weight compared to the big rig 
raging over Chris, his body
flattening under its 18-wheel poundage. 
At the neighborhood store
where he worked, friends place 
a book for thoughts like these, 
though more heaven bent, near
an altar on the cereal shelf, stacked 
boxes of Life beside it. This is one 
small way we hold on, or try to.




Bastille Day Parade

From a café
on the Champs Elysées
I watch tanks
enter Paris, drive wind into awnings 
as horses' hooves strike stone, spark 
fire. The waiter returns
to take my order:
Victor
with his single
silver stud.



 
The Myth of Love

Forgive love
for not arriving, not 
undressing nor dressing us 
in silk. For warmth we can 
wrap ourselves in the story 
of Cupid and Psyche:

The myth contends
we must become immortal
for love. Let that be myth– 
or even with Cupid close, 
we wonder if a loved one 
will appear, and our trials

of gathering and sorting 
end. We nearly perish 
from our longings.
No, let our future be 
the story written 
slowly,

the amorous, unhurried hand.


 

The Eternal Dunderhead

You dim reaper! Undiscriminating fool! 
What a dunce, to dispose of life – ficus, 
grandfather, cat – as if it all were one.

Lunkheaded leveler, scat! Take only 
your chum Time and that term “lifeline.” 
Things are round; things return. Think

perennials; think full moons. Even 
winter brings revival: Thanks-
givings with the family gathered, laughing

at an uncle who took what we called 
forever, to do the carving; Decembers 
sledding in Christopher Morley Park,

my father holding onto my brother 
and me as we all careened downhill, 
lugging the toboggan back up

the slopes again until dark fell 
heavy upon us, my mother ready 
with cocoa and buttered toast

as we trekked melting snow 
through the doorway and shivered 
off the cold. Why should such warm 


moments end, you simple-minded 
summoner? The family lessened, my parents 
bent with the effects of time unmistakable

in my life, too. Any half-wit knows 
the loved and needed shouldn’t perish 
with the rest. Let villains go; let roaches

lose their durability; but let the beloved
outlast boulders, pyramids, gold, breaking 
only like waves that crash against the pier, 
then rush to converge again.



 
Root

Between the root and its offshoot, 
between versāre and verse
come the plough, the field, the seed.

Between to turn and its descent 
into poem, a hand drives
the ox-cart, makes furrow

after furrow, overturns 
and seeds the earth: 
ancestor to the act

of another hand 
planting word-rows 
across the page.

Oh, to keep ourselves 
from falling! 
To sow both the seed

and the promise, 
both the land
and the desire

 and reap the ripe harvest, 
centuries forward, 
from the verdant field.

 

 
Keeping Time

Remarkable, the baboon fibula 
found in Africa – 37,000-year-old 
“calendar bone” – whose 28 notches

map phases of the moon, our first
ancestors harnessing time. Never our nature 
to relax into the unbound, though I would

gladly fasten my days with strokes
of the pen, time permitting, not just a line 
here, line there. Egyptians divined

the hour Babylonians would 
split into minute parts, then seconds 
(wretched seconds). As if we could

hold on to time through such 
measures, or through months named
for the “immortals”: those Roman Senators

bestowing one more honor
on their Caesar. Sandal-kissers! 
What honors for the living

rest of us? I do digress. Untimely 
tribute for Julius, July another glory 
Brutus and Cassius couldn’t endure

any more than the French 
could abide time’s rule before 
their Revolution, seizing the year

from those head-of-the-class 
clergy. New Year’s no longer
hitched to Christ, the poet d’Eglantine

inscribed the year’s rhythms: Vendémiaire
for September’s vendange, summer-soaked 
grapes gathered for harvest; Brumaire,

October’s marbled fog drifting over
the landscape. Seasons circled through 
spring’s seed and flower (Germinal,

Floréal), till Napoleon switched 
time to industry’s hum, days
restored to the Saints of Trade. My day

job means two months, now three
to finish this verse. With each ticking
task we clock in more than out, prisoners

of minutiae. Do these measures
all matter? Will you find a moment 
for this or any other poem? One night

I watched a lunar eclipse, 
the shadowed moon, a reporter 
recounted, “occurring occasionally since

the beginning of time” so precious 
I’ve no patience for grand 
imprecision: time dates back

13.7 billion years; no baboon bones 
yet, nor the 4.6-billion-year Earth 
nor moon: only Bang! Beautiful!

What spans! If I only had one 
more day, a friend says will be his 
epitaph. All of ours if we can’t better

measure our presence in this world, 
the timeless part of us hungry
to count itself: I’m here, I’m here!

Time’s an escape artist anyway.


 

Nature Studies

We pick up everything 
we press against, fold it 
into our center: a man says
I'm older than I look, looking 
older than he is; and a singer 
confesses I've had no training 
as if her voice didn't reveal it.
They endure better than the boy

who believes he isn't bright, 
the girl insisting delicately
she has no grace. Better to fold 
in the rare, lucent reminder:

a yoga teacher instructs us to stand 
with feet hip-length apart
and corrects us:  most of you
overestimate your hips.

At the beach, I watch two boys 
press their faces in the sand
of dune after dune.  Each lifts 
himself away quickly, shakes
the grains from his ears
and witnesses his impression
in that shifting 
sediment.




The Zigzag of Light

Blue waves, 
the shortest, 
struggle most
when they encounter 
water droplets or 
dust. They scatter 
then enter
our vision
from different sites.
This is why 
the sky 
appears blue.

After a storm
if sun emerges
its light is bent
by air’s lingering
water the way
it’s bent by a prism
balanced
in an open hand.
This is why
we can admire
at times
a rainbow’s full fire

and might be why, 
knowing, too, the sun’s 
gases travel up
from its core
and ring the hot star
like a ten 
thousand-toned 
bell

I’m inclined 
towards some 
strange faith
as the sun sends
down its distant 
harmonies and light

casts fine patterns 
on the pock-marked 
mountains, grey
factories and trains, on spires
and temples and border 
guards, on men 
searching through 
recycle bins and women
stepping over the gutters’
stones and on the homes
of this street with their dust- 
streaked panes and between 
the closed slats
of the blinds.




Ways We Hold

Strange how hands can 
lose their touch: unopened 
jars, inexplicably split 
fingernails, and casualties 
from cutting bagels the wrong 
way, one hand underneath
as the other slices ignobly towards it.
But I remember a better 
dexterity: girls conversing 
while their hands fly and fix
each other’s hair; brothers playing
Heart and Soul, four hands
on a shared keyboard.  All those
hands, and how they hold! 
Not the nervous fellow 
wringing his own, of course, 
but generous hands, yours, 
their round touch on each 
page, and then that moment 
when we rest, intertwined,
hearts pulsing even in the thumbs.

 




Missing Links

From childhood 
we learn to connect 
the dots, finish off
that face.  But why depend
on linking lines?

 I welcome
the return of chaos
theory but even it declares 
a pattern in things.

 I tell you, randomness
rules us:  the economist in debt,
the singer who stutters when he speaks,
the devout married mother of three stealing 
off to a motel:

 Wonderful 
tangle of traits
bound only by that single
thin tie-twist of self.
 
Jennifer Arin was born and raised in New York, lived for four years in France, and now lives in California, where she earned degrees from U.C. Berkeley, 
San Francisco State University, and Mills College. She is the author of the poetry book Ways We Hold and the verse chapbook The Roots of Desire, 
and her poetry and creative nonfiction have been published in both the U.S. and Europe, including in The AWP Writer’s Chronicle, The San Francisco 
Chronicle, Gastronomica, Puerto del Sol, Poet Lore, ZYZZYVA, Lucero, Paris/Atlantic Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and 
Virgin Atlantic's in-flight magazine, among many others. She also has done poetry segments for the television programs Henry’s Garden and KRON 
4 News (KRON-TV, San Francisco). Her numerous awards include a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a PEN Writers'  
Writers-On-Site funding from the Spanish Ministry of Culture for collaborative research for, and editing of, a book about Spain’s Civil War. She teaches 
in the English Department at San Francisco State University.