Poetry by Jessica Goodfellow

     Emma K Alexandra CC






Ark
                  “Mourning has no place here.”  ~Enrique S. Villasis, translated from the Filipino by Bernard Kean Capinpin.  
        
Moon takes the side of the weak--
the badger, the firefly, the thief.

It’s why songbirds migrate at night,
navigating by the stars and by sympathetic Moon.

Cuckoos, orioles, warblers and the ducks--
the land-based birds, cooled by dark’s

stable currents, wings wide, 
noctivagant, fly high above sleep-

ing predators, thinking Morning has no place 
here, which is what I thought I’d heard when

Noah read aloud Mourning has no place here. 
Morning/Mourning: one’s the sun coming from

under the world, the other’s the son going to
the underworld, so I’d misunderstood the line--

a translation, used to being misconstrued 
though oddly, this was before the whole Babel thing.  

Anyway, as usual, like Noah, I’d conflated time 
and space, and—let me be honest—also mood. Moon 

looks upon this weakness of mine, and sighs
a stream of clouds that confuses the migrant

birds, who fly off, lost, never to return
to the ark, which Noah reads as a hope-

ful sign that the dark night that ended 
what we had thought of as our lives

is over, and morning is coming.
At least, I think he said morning. 



Note: “Mourning has no place here” is from Enrique S. Villasis’s “Ark,” translated from the Filipino by Bernard Kean Capinpin.  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/161506/ark-6544186dae6a3

​



​
Human, Falling                   

Walking is controlled falling;
running is not.

Poetry is controlled falling;
sobbing is not.

Sobbing is uncontrolled falling,
unless it is controlled crawling--

up, up and out. Forgiveness, too, 
a controlled fall, after an unchecked plummet.     

In dreams, I often fall, I nosedive--
I never fly. Breathe in to rise. Breathe 

out to fall. Behind a closed door I hear 
your voice, rising, falling, almost singing.

I do not know who you are talking to. 
Here’s a Japanese maxim: Fall down 

seven times, get up eight.
Counting is the opposite of falling.

I added that last part about counting. 
Oh Icarus, we love you get up. 

To fall for is to fall in love and also to be
made a fool of. In either case we fall

apart or else fall into place. Sometimes we fall
off the radar or go into free fall, which isn’t

at all free. All intimacy is some kind of falling.
Stomachs drop, and hearts, and are caught

by our complicated anatomy, our last resort--
skin, that catch-all. Adam, Eve, are you listening?

So much of what matters is falling
into the falling. We practice daily 

by walking, aim to fall at least 10,000 times--
our own Sisyphean challenge to cheat

death. Each evening on the balcony I wait for night
to fall a certain shade of indigo. Later I fall 

asleep, forgetting all the other ways throughout the day 
that I have fallen—into a trap, a lap, a heap. Fall asleep

seven times, wake up six. That’s a human maxim,
or should be. Perhaps it’s a human minimum--

the bottom drops out, the curtain falls, and off the map 
goes someone we love, but we don’t know where, 

or if there’s anything to break
that final fall—some god’s balaclava, or

our own shredded memories, piled up
like autumn leaves, and moldering.

​



Jessica Goodfellow’s books are Whiteout (University of Alaska Press, 2017), Mendeleev’s Mandala, and The Insomniac’s Weather Report. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac. Former writer-in-residence at Denali National Park and Preserve, she’s had work in the Beloit Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Ploughshares, Scientific American, The Southern Review, and Threepenny Review. Jessica is an American poet living in Japan.
​