I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown. Some poems are so important to me that I never discuss them.

I hold them close like cherished songs or spells, only turning to them

when the occasion absolutely calls for their voicing.

And even then, I try not to say them out loud, but whisper,

with hopes the wind swallows up their sounds.

When reciting such poems, the histories of their words come alive.

I don't want their vibrations to accidentally land in someone's ears, and find that suddenly

a bouquet of Zenia's magically blooms from their heads.

These are poems that are meant to enter the body at the right time,

to exist there, to do their healing and be on their way.

They are not for close reading or exegesis. They protect the threshold between the living

and the dead. They remind one of old roads, they return the frog to his kingdom.

I wish not to drain these poems of their powers through too much talk, nor debased them with inferior lectures about meters and such.

The last time I committed the era of guiding a class to the secret treasures of one such poem, I

praised the general sweep of language, how it rumbled and sought steadiness through

the extended conceit of a broom and how emotion builds such

that the speaker, no, the poet, could do no more but treat her loves to a cavalry of singing.

I broke into a sweat and was nearing tears thinking of the poet before she soared.

The class wanted to know if she was being ironic, if the broom was a symbol of impertinence

and rebellion.

I accuse them of not ever being in love, nor having their hearts handed to them in an old

...