Jasmine

With dusk’s slow bleed, the scent comes back 

from beyond our gate, sickly-sweetly powdering the yard

and its scattered buckets, chalk, decapitated 

plastic fauna—how all the bright junk 

rushes to the pixelated surface 

in the final minutes before remorse 

douses the world in itself. High-tops on the phone wire

already mortared into silhouettes, like crows.

Roof rat in the plum tree, synching its intricate listening 

with the stop-start taps on my MacBook 

ten feet beneath. Wondering what’s taking us so long

to vanish. Its tail pulses from its rich perch 

with what I thought I had once—a hunger 

so absorbing it becomes, while nothing changes,

its own reward. Some hidden dark

where you could crouch and find a pattern. 

While nothing changes; while the scent of jasmine

flutters and drifts, like sympathy, living for itself.

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“I wrote ‘Jasmine’ during the summer of 2020. In addition to the events of the summer, two passages from my reading came to mind while I was working on certain phrases. At the risk of presenting more interesting material than the poem itself, I will share them. First, from the philosopher Paul Preciado: ‘Our disappearance, though certain, is only relatively imminent.’ And second, from a conversation between the poets Rickey Laurentiis and Solmaz Sharif: ‘Difference, finally…seems a more actionable rallying point or topic of discussion than sameness. And sameness is what empathy depends upon.’”
—Nate Klug