  PoetsUSA.com | | | | 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!"