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Alicia Ostriker: "Jersey Transit" and Other Poems 
JERSEY
TRANSIT | THE VOCABULARY
OF JOY
JERSEY TRANSIT i That black woman with the extraordinary earringsHaranguing that black man about the contradictions Of society, challenging his premises, she's Been doing it since the freezing Trenton platform Where the rest of us shivered and looked at our watches. Doctrinally correct, but He's tired from work and He's just been helplessly viewing her breasts The whole trip between Trenton and New Brunswick. ii Father and son in the aisle, the man'sMouth is hair-thin; nose too; it would seem he exercises Much control. He is pointing something out Among the grimy smokestacks of Elizabeth-- Telephone wires? A church? His boy looks aside and says: "Forget it, dad." iii The elderly passenger,
the young conductor, negotiate.
Copyright © Alicia Ostriker, from Green Age, U of Pittsburgh Press, 1989. Used by permission of the author. All rights reserved by the author and her publisher.
THE VOCABULARY OF JOY I'm on the grass in front of the library, writingIn the usual notebook. A couple passes:
Mother African,
father Caucasian. Describe the laugh. Barreling Doesn't do it, neither does pealing. Much less can I define the happiness, Though surely you know what I mean In the late twentieth century When I say this.
LOCKOUT He sets his Campus
Security cap on the stairs.
Sighing.
--I came here when I was five. I don't know about
this language lab,
But
never English. Why? Because, when I was small, It was my people
who greeted him, who said: *Ola.* THE NATURE OF BEAUTY I can only
say, there we have been; but I cannot
As
sometimes whiteness forms in a clear sky
A piece
at a time, like the limbs of Osiris. The vapor of the
word collects,
THE BOYS, THE BROOMHANDLE, THE RETARDED GIRL
Who was asking
for it--
It is she of whom
these boys
Now and again,
because we need,
Copyright © 1998 by Alicia Ostriker from The Crack in Everything (Pittsburgh U. Press). Used by permission of the author. All rights reserved by the author and her publisher. |
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Poet
and literary essayist, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, lives in Princeton and
teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at Rutgers University.
She is the author of nine books of poetry, including
The Crack in Everything (U. of Pittsburg Press, 1996) which was
a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Paterson Poetry Prize
and the San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Her latest book of poetry,
The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, (U. of Pittsburg Press,
1998) which was also a finalist for the National Book Award was a finalist
for the Lenore Marshall Nation Prize.) The Imaginary Lover
(1986), won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of
America. Alica Suskin Ostriker’s poetry and essays have appeared
in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review,The Nation, Paris Review,
The New Yorker and numerous other literary magazineds and periodicals.
The University of Michigan Press published Ostriker's astute commentary
in Dancing at the Devil's Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics and the
Erotic. in 1999. She has written several other highly acclaimed critical
works, including The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and
Revisions (1994) and Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's
Poetry in America (1986). The poet wrote NJPoets.com saying,"
I’m proud to be a New Jersey poet, in the line of Whitman, Williams,
Ginsberg, and all my brother and sister New Jersey poets writing today--what
a lineup!"