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Seattle Poet Jed Myers
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Jed Myers was born in Philadelphia in 1952 to parents of Eastern European Jewish heritage. He
studied Creative Writing with an
emphasis in poetry at Tufts University, graduating in 1974,
and went on, after medical training,
to pursue a career in psychiatry. He settled in Seattle, where he and his wife
raised three children. He maintains
a solo therapy practice and teaches at the University of Washington. Meyers
kept writing poems, but did not seek
publication until the events of
September 11th, 2001. Since that time, his work has been widely published.
For several years now he has been active in maintaining a consortium of music-and-poetry open-mic cabarets called Easy
Speak Seattle.
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Jed Myers, on drums, often performs with Band of Poets including John Burgess, Anna Jenkins, Ted McMahon, and Rosanne Olson sometimes joined by other musicians and poets.
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I
first encountered Myers’s work last summer in in an on-line collection of work in response to the humanitarian immigration disaster on the Mexican-American border and the Trump maladministration of jettisoning traditional legal avenues of claiming asylum , forcibly turning back border crossers,
separating families, and indefinitely
detaining most who got across in virtual
concentration camps. He commented
about his contribution:
For all its
shocking immediacy, an image of tragedy on our southern border seems to embody
our burned-out distance. The drowned father and little daughter are casualties
of our country’s deep currents of fear. The truth that we’re all Americans
north and south is lost in the hubbub of nationhood. We take the river as
border, denying our deeper unity. I hope my poem holds and conveys the
embarrassment of our self-distancing.
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The image of the bodies of asylum seekers Alberto Ramirez and his toddler daughter Valeria in the Rio Grande briefly caught the attention of Americans and shocked the shockable.
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American Border Study—Two Bodies in a River
Oscar Alberto
Martinez Ramirez and his daughter, Valeria, Rio Grande, Matamoros, Mexico
We’ll recall her
small arm on his neck.
We’ll forget
them there in the shallows.
We wonder at the
black cloth they share.
We don’t get it
was how he held her.
We see clearly
her short red pants.
We miss the pink
disposable diaper.
We note the
bamboo stalks on the shore.
We grow our
bamboo along the link fence.
We see sun in
the river’s slow ripples.
We have no
fierce current here in the frame.
We’re touched
their dark heads wind up together.
We are spared
their still-eyed stare.
We’re shocked
the camera shot them in the back.
We’re not
especially surprised.
We’re living the
lives they might have.
We haven’t been
breathing water.
We understand
it’s father and daughter.
We don’t have
our noses in the mud.
—Jed Myers
from Poets
Respond
June 30, 2019
This
deeply personal poem won the 2013 Literal Latte Poetry Award.
Going to Bed
These nights I
slip down into sleep
in minutes,
freed from a lifelong
ritual, the slow
obsessive surrender
of my vigilance.
Some nights it took hours
to check all
measures on the interior
monitor —
savings, the kids’
immunizations,
endangered birds,
the boy down the
block gone to war….
Now, it isn’t
that peregrines nest
again on the
Hudson’s bridges (they do),
nor that the
detainees are released
from Guantanamo
(they are not).
I know the
cisterns of Hanford are fractured
and bleeding our
cancers into the river.
I know the
immigrants wait in the culverts
to cross into
Texas. I drift anyway.
I’m sure it’s
not that when I lie down
in my bed, no
one else is there
in the flesh who
will press the points
of the thorns of
the day. And I’d swear
it isn’t that I
am eased to know
my children,
nomads now on their own
in this
carbon-hazed wilderness, succeed
in trading the
gold of true affection.
It’s just that I
slide into silence,
into the soil of
sleep, down dream’s
rivulets, with
no resistance, knowing
this: a few I’ve
loved have descended
for good, from
air into earth, left
the world still
pressing its weather east,
spring's
blackberry stalks infiltrating
the beach paths,
mosquitoes drinking
the sweet sera
of lovers asleep
in each other's
arms at dawn…. We go on
crossing over
our mingled lost,
our footfalls on
the sun-stained grass
a comfort to
them if they listen in
their sleep
(they can’t, but they haven't gone
far). We have
our dark-hour meetings
(in topsoil?
synapses?) — they thank us
for breathing,
as we still play the leaves
while they take
to the roots (a comfort
to us as we draw
the sheets like first
layers of dust
up to our cheeks).
Last night my
father and I took our seats
at a cafe table
in part of the city
I’d never seen.
His eyes gleamed
as he piped up
Let’s eat. So it was
and it wasn’t
real. He looked serene —
not rushed as he’d
always been
(in his
vigilance). Dawn pressed
its way through
the slats, and I surfaced.
He lingered. So
I’ll sink
again tonight,
in trust,
into the
under-life, a surrender
to depths off
the monitor, to the silt
where my mother’s
father still picnics
and holds a baby
girl up to the sun
by a Western
Pennsylvania river —
where, a
closed-eye blink later,
a thin boy in
Lithuania runs
from a house on
fire, toward America,
into the
immeasurable brightness of love.
It’s this: up
from the loam of devotion,
out of the
night, some will return,
by the human
xylem of heartwood
and vine, to
gather actual sun,
here in the
blood's branches creaking
in time; some
will remain in the night,
out of reach of
the light's last fingers,
beneath our
prisons, bridges, beds,
in the intricate
unconscious mulch
where the world
dreams its births, riots,
blooms, monsoons
— a matter of inches
deep, under the
lids of our eyes,
in this one
tissue that sleeps and dies.
—Jed Myers
And finally—
Poem for My
Country
Not far from my city,
I walked under tall trees
by a river whose
name soon escaped me.
Silty-green
eddies, white froth dressing
the rocks, flat
current over what I thought
must be the
depths, a riffle dazzled
the shallows. I
lost perspective
to the strobe of
the wind-shaken maples’
foliage fringing
the shore. Were they swallows
who sped and
veered, who caught the living
dust of the
hovering bug constellations?
A few splashes
some yards upriver,
little eruptions
of silver, what might be
a fish, I bent for a better look under
a branch, and
saw on the edge up ahead
a kid spin a
flat rock to skip, and it did.
What country is
this? A moment in wonder,
no answer. The
water coursed past
in and out of
the bright and the dark, I heard
the elements’
vigorous frictions, dignified
groans of the
cedars and firs, and imagined
the current
grinding away at the stones.
What country is
this? Perhaps it is known
to the singing
boughs spread over the banks,
to the stones,
or the invisible fish.
—Jed
Myers
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