To the Goddesses & the Gods

Invocation

.

Musai,

this offering,

that with each line of the words, crushed-

rock dust is cracked and planed down hard upon the consonants,

whereas the fine dust, the lighter-than-air,

it flows throughout the vowels,

it swirls a slow smoke loop or two inside the hollow of an o or an a

and then released, and away,

spark-trails drift diagonal across five sun-beams,

and away...

I had gotten a first-class education in poetry and was en route to an academic career. I had had an overwhelming spiritual experience: the presence of Goddesses and the Gods, primarily the Olympians and the Greek Cthonic deities. I needed to be in just the right place to write good poetry about Them. Accordingly, I ran away to Las Vegas. I wanted the mountains...the light...the colors...the ambition...

I've been bad at life at times but I'm good at this. You may never be able to unsee Them again.

Auteur

Since first publishing in 2019, Todd Jackson has published often and widely. He has begun collecting his backlog into chapbooks. The Wilkinsburg Double Sonnets represents his poems composed in 2020. Interrogation in Ice and Silver, finished in 2011, represents the peak of his Modernist-influenced period. Todd Jackson got two years in at Colunbia University before the money ran out, received his BA from Clarion University of Pennsylvania and his MA from The Johns Hopkins University. After ten years of college teaching he moved West for a life of writing poetry while making his way through two crashes, a boom, and a pandemic, most of it in Las Vegas, much in Pittsburgh.

Asked if it would be appropriate to start polishing his Nobel, he replied "I do like them shiny."