Chris
Rice Cooper
*The images in this specific piece are granted copyright
privilege by: Public Domain, CCSAL, GNU Free Documentation Licenses, Fair
Use Under The United States Copyright Law, or given copyright privilege by the
copyright holder which is identified beneath the individual photo.
Chapbook by Jessica Jacobs:
In
Whatever Light Left To Us
“Ecstasy of the Natural
In Love and In War”
*This is an analysis of Christal Rice Cooper's interpretation of In Whatever Light Left To Us
**Jessica Jacbos quotes from an interview between Cooper and Jacobs are italicized within the analysis.
Carol Bennett Lily Darragh Seth Pennington
Most of the poems center on the
relationship Jacobs has with her wife, poet Nickole Brown (http://www.nickolebrown.com/about): ““We
met in December of 2007, just after Nickole’s first book, Sister, came out. I was living in New York and she was there to
give a few readings. We ended up at the same terrible party in the East
Village, staffed by bartenders-in-training. During the very long wait for
drinks, amid the crowd of close-cropped New York women clad all in black, a
beautiful blonde in a white tank top with Dietrich-red lip- stick made room for
me at the bar. She told me she was a poet and had a reading the next night (I
groaned inwardly, imagining a potentially wonderful thing about to be ruined by
sub-par poetry). But I went to the reading anyway, heard Nick’s haunting,
strikingly honest poems, and was lost. After a lengthy correspondence, we spent
six years apart as friends—a separation that thankfully ended in 2013.”
Jessica Feb. 2008 Nickole 2007
Copyright granted by Jessica Jacobs
The poems In Whatever Light Left To Us
were written between 2013 (“In a Thicket
of Body-Bent Grass”) to 2015 (“Curly,
My Tangler.”).
Copyright granted by Jessica Jacobs
While
Jacobs was teaching her final semester as Writer-In-Residence in Hendrix
College (https://www.hendrix.edu/life/), she gave a poetry
reading of these poems. Sibling Rivalry
Press (https://siblingrivalrypress.com) publishers and close
friends Seth Pennington and Bryan Borland were in the audience, and they were
impressed with her work.
“A few days later, they said they’d be happy
to publish a chapbook of those
poems while I sent out the full-length to be considered by various presses. I
have such admiration for them—as poets, publishers, and people—and am honored
to be a part of the Sibling Rivalry Press family (https://www.facebook.com/siblingrivalrypress/).”
Sibling Rivalry Press Facebook Logo
In Whatever Light Left To Us Jessica
Jacobs experiences things that can only be described in a short sentence: ecstasy of the natural.
Jessica- copyright granted by Jessica Jacobs
And these poems are packed full of
metaphors and descriptive words on nature
habitat (damp earth, field, fire, forest, hill, lake silt, ponds, rivers,
rocks, sky, soil, tide, translucent trails, white water mountains, waves); animal and insect life (beaks, bees,
box turtles, clam shells, deer, fawn, gulls, nests, ravens, robins, spittlebug
nest, swallows, tire-splayed birds, white ants); plant life (birches, blueberries, branches, crab grass, dahlias, hackberry,
koi, oat grass, orange rinds, peonies, pines, poplars, redwoods, roots, stems;
and anything dealing with the female
body: tongue, flesh, skin, bone, and
sweat.
Public Domain Photos
Photoshopped by Chris Rice Cooper
In Whatever Light Left To Us reads
like a short story in poetry: the
speaker of the poem recognizes her attraction for the female sex at the early
age of seven.
Jessica age 7
Copyright granted by Jessica Jacobs
By age 13 she discovers her own body – all of
its femaleness. She has appreciation and
sexual attraction to the female body, which she finds just as natural as saying
the grass is green, the sky is blue, and milk comes from cows.
Jessica age 14. Copyright granted by Jessica Jacobs
She soon recognizes her body’s natural
God given talent to dance in the form of hiking, long distance running, and
long distance bicycling which she does in solitude. This solitude guides her to
accept her own self and who she is, which includes being gay.
Jessica Jacobs and NIckole Brown from left to right, Bryan Borland, Laura-Anne Vosselaar (the sole witness at Jessica/Nickole's wedding), and Seth Pennington.
She finds poetry and then find her soul-mate poet
Nickole Brown. And all of these
discoveries are natural, organic, nothing to be ashamed of, and something that
is meant to be until her wife Brown faces a possible health scare (depicted in the poems "When Your Surgeon Brought Snapshots to the Waiting Room" and "Post-Op, Still Out of It, You said, I Would") and that is one darkness
that she refuses to allow to enter into their light.
In ““There
Ain’t Nothing Like Breck for Stop n’ Stare Hair” the speaker of the poem at
the age of seven is fighting the attraction she has to the women in the shampoo
ads.
Prell. Breck. So many ways to
get your hair
glossy. So much skin
just off-screen.
I tried to keep myself
from wanting
to see.
In “13
Birthday and Something Said to Wake Early” the speaker of the poem is in Longwood,
Florida standing on a dock where she observes the beauty of one alligator slowly raising its head, breaking the water’s surface.
At its touch, carp leapt attacking
minnows, each splash triggering
a band of explosions, ripples
shattering against the dock.
And there I was hovering
above a lake now boiling with
fish. Herons made their long-necked
dives. And me
in that body, newly teenager, my
legs and underarms freshly clear cut, razed
by razor blade, naked to the
day. Breasts heavy and foreign as a knapsack. Desire
just as weighted – an insistent pull
in my gut, flush in my chest. I wanted
to be
anywhere else, I wanted to be, suddenly
with
others.
Public Domain Photos
Photoshopped by Chris Rice Cooper
Perhaps this scene is not a scene of violence or
a feeding frenzy or something to be ashamed or afraid of – it is simply
alligator and fish doing what they are born to do – participating in a dance
that is as natural as a man making love to a woman, woman making love to a woman.
The speaker of the poem associates the odors of
the pond, the alligator, the fish and the dance they participate in to the
odors of her own body, the female body.
The brine and swell of them, the splintered smell as I lay my cheek
to the boards, new
stink from my armpits, which I had not yet learned
to mask, musk from the
panties I’d dreamt in – a smell I could not yet
name, the warm of it,
the sweet sour ache of a body, opening.
Marlene Dietrich kisses a woman in the film MOROCCO, 1930
In “Sex,
Suddenly, Everywhere” she fears rejection and discrimination from others
for simply being gay. She becomes
depressed, and finds relief from her depression by exhibiting her God-given
talents her body possess - running.
My body cried out for
armor. Big boned,
broad shouldered, I was built for
it: forced into a dress without shoulder
pads,
I was the 80s’ littlest
linebacker. So I began to run, clanking
like a tank around cul-de-sacs. Began to climb, building biceps
strong enough to stiff-arm the world
away. Even my heart grew
heavy, grew into one more thing to
carry.
Copyright granted by Jessica Jacobs
It is in this communing of body to self and self
to nature she enters a natural world of wonder with insect life (black and red
lovebugs in “Sex Ed”); animal life (magpies in “Though We Made Love in the
Afternoons”) and plant life (red dahlias in “Post-Op, Still Out of It, You
Said, I Would”). And most of this
communing is while she is running or bicycling and in solitude.
Basket of Dahlias. Attributed to Henri Fantin-Latour
Public Domain
In “And
That’s How I Almost Died of Foolishness in a Beautiful Florida” Jacobs
continues to run mostly in solitude – late at night where there is more imagery
of the alligators symbolizing water traps:
Nights, I ran golf
courses whose water traps
shone red, with the
eyes of alligators and rang
with their falsely
innocuous chorus
of chirps.
This
time the term alligators doesn’t symbolize nature but something that is
unnatural – a force that is doing its best in preventing her to acknowledge
that she is gay, leading her to feel despair almost to the point where she considers
suicide.
Why I spent all
day
staring at the lake,
wading shoreline
where gators found
their daily shade, thinking
it wouldn’t be that
bad, really,
couldn’t be much worse
than this
to offer myself to
those jaws, those
daggered rows of
teeth.
Instead
Jacobs presses on and works in a variety of career fields: rock climbing instructor, bartender, editor,
professor, and poet.
Jessica rock climbing. Copyright granted by Jessica Jacobs.
It is in “Out of Windfields” that she moves to Indiana to discover poetry, and
to attend graduate school at Purdue University.
Grid by grid,
dutifully, I logged my
miles, the hours
on my feet, but kept
track of nothing
so much as my
loneliness.
Jessica Jacobs attributed to Lily Darragh
Copyright granted by Jessica Jacobs
She believes if she can find poetry she
will be able to be like the majestic turbines, which she describes as animals –
its metal covering just a façade over flesh and blood.
majestic, amphibious
animals in their proper
element. Able to arc into the unseeable and return
with power.
But Jessica is unable to be a turbine
despite trying for three years until she meets Brown, who is more than a poet,
lover, but the creative god.
a turbine’s
red light pulsed its beacon through the rain. Beneath it
your hands bound me
back together. In answering
prayer, I folded
myself into the footwell; knelt
between your
knees. And my mouth
to you was every water
I’d ever tasted:
The first automatically operated wind turbine, built in
Cleveland in 1887 by Charles F. Brush. It was 60 feet (18 m) tall, weighed
4 tons (3.6 metric tonnes) and powered a 12 kW generator with a photo of Jessica and Nickole at their wedding. Public Domain and copyright by Jessica Jacobs. Photoshopped by Chris Rice Cooper.
Majority of the poems are love poems to
her wife Brown and the love poems are universal and individual, the most
compelling and emotional for Jacobs to write was “A Question to Ask Once the Honeymoon is
Over.”
Jessica and Nickole. Copyright by Jessica Jacobs.
“It
is a poem about a failure of action that made me question the kind of person I
was when no one was looking. Halfway
through writing the marriage poems, I was reading a journal I’d kept after
first moving to Little Rock and found this incident, which I’d forgotten (or
possibly blocked out). With only minor tweaks and the addition of line breaks,
this poem is directly from those pages—a very rare experience for me. Honestly,
the hardest part of the whole writing process was reading this to Nickole for
the first time.”
I hadn’t been passed
by a car for
miles. Figuring
if it was still there,
I’d
pick it up on the way
back, I cycled past.
Photo attributed to Chris Rice Cooper
Copyright granted by Chris Rice Cooper
At
first most readers might think In Whatever Light Left To Us
is just a love story between the speaker of the poem Jacobs and Brown, but it
is so much more. It is the love story of
life and the naturalness of that life and the willingness to accept what the
natural origin of that life is; even when there are obstacles preventing us
from doing this – and these obstacles can be people unwilling to recognize the
power of romantic true love between two women.
More importantly it is the power of love at war against anything trying to harm Jacobs, Brown, or their relationship. It is no longer
an “I” but a “we” and it is no longer a love story but a story of war: the power of love conquering anything that
tries to destroy whatever light is left to them.
But, love, the sun has
lived
barely half its life.
There’s time. It’s taken half of mine to
learn
the only way to make
anything matter
is to have you there
to witness it.
--Excerpt,
“In a Thicket of Body-Bent Grass”
Jessica and Nickole on their wedding day.
Copyright granted by Jessica Jacobs.
Salt Lake City Mormon Temple 
