Jacob Have I Loved


Jacob Have I Loved 

I.

I think I lost the genetic lottery,
my cousin told me

in one of the last conversations
we had. He was thirty-three,

our parents twins. We were living
again the few good stories.

Tell me the one
about Esau.

 

II.

Tell me about God hating him.
I want it to be a problem

of translation: language or time.
I have never met an Esau,

and what chance
does a born person have,

though we name them all Jacob?
Tell me my own daughter

doesn’t wonder
if she’s naked.

She is running through the yard
explaining something to her sister.

I want to keep her
from hiding 

in the understory
as Eve did

with Adam, children
believing they could

disappear
from God.

 

III.

The absurdity of hiding anywhere:
I want to show her

how to hold her fear
like a child of her own

how to ask it, between sobs,
where it hurts.

 

IV.

Can I hold you when you’re born?
my daughter asks. She is sitting on my lap.

We’re sorting photos of my cousin,
every one in time,

collapsed. Not a good shot
at any age.

I hold up the best, a young man,
to take a picture

of the picture for the obituary.
I orbit it for some time,

trying to remove my body
from the light,

believing the shadow on his face
is from me.

 

V.

I’ve tried to remove my body.
How afraid have I been

of being found in it,
unblessed?

There is no reason for beauty,  
no metric

that holds—
a blessing

in itself.
How we look

to one another.
Don’t you have

even one blessing
left for me?

 

VI.

The shadow is in the photo,
on him, in the room

where he stood without me,
before I was born.

 

VII.

In our yard it’s getting dark;
shadows are blessings

that diffuse all the glare
from the heavens.

In the cool of the evening
they heard God

walking around in the garden:
Where are you?

My daughter’s face is a clean window.
No glare to mirror

or ask if I am naked,
if she is Jacob—

only this reflection
in one another’s eyes.


 "Jacob Have I Loved" first appeared in the Spring 2022 issue of VQR

 
Study for a monument, 2022. Gianni Moretti. Digital print on paper, 23x30 cm.

 


Object Permanence 
 

My daughter learns I’m there
even when I am not. I name this trust,

and I begin to exist
in her as she began

to exist in me
before I saw her.

You were thirty-three, your father and
my mother twins, our cells

drawn to face one another,
as the image of the vase:

two straying lines,
figure-and-ground.

It is joy to be hidden,
said Winnicott

a disaster 
not to be found.

One line erased, the vase
disappears, the face

that still sees sees a field: empty
and full of grasses,

a drawing of nothing,
of everything, undivided: the only story

of permanence I believe.
I name it trust.

But grammar
is deep—I Love

wants You,
my cells, their twins,

your heart,
the vase,

your missing face
I’m still breathing toward,

still drawing. Close,
each time I look.


 

Study for a monument, 2022. Gianni Moretti. Digital print on paper, 23x30 cm.

Leah Naomi Green is the author of The More Extravagant Feast (Graywolf Press), selected by Li-Young Lee for the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and named “one of the best books of 2020” by The Boston Globe. She received the 2021 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award for compassion, courage, truth-telling, and commitment to justice, as well an Academy of American Poets 2021 Climate Action Poetry Prize. Green teaches environmental studies and English at Washington and Lee University and was the 2021-2022 Sherwood Anderson Distinguished Visiting Writer in Poetry at Guilford College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, Tin House, Poem-a-Day,VQR, The Southern Review, Orion, Shenandoah, Ecotone, and Pleiades among other publications, and has been featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered”. She has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and is a silver winner of the 2020 Nautilus Book Awards. Her chapbook, The Ones We Have, won the 2012 Flying Trout Chapbook prize. Green lives in Rockbridge County, Virginia where she and her family homestead and grow or find much of their food for the year.

Gianni Moretti was born in Perugia (1978) and lives and works in Milan. Drawings and installations, as well as relational art practices and public monuments, are the main media and forms used in his research, which is focused on the strength, limits and shadows of different kinds of organisms. His works are exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad, including two Venice Biennale Collateral Events. They are also part of private and public collections. Among the awards and grants he has received: In 2016 P.A.C., Piano per l’Arte Contemporanea by MiC, Italian Ministry of Culture; Terna 05 Award 2013 (selected finalist), Rome; SetUp Award 2013, Bologna (first prize); Rugabella Art Prize 2011, Milan (first prize); San Fedele Prize 2007, Milan (special mention); XXIII Oscar Signorini Award 2006, Milan (first prize); 2006 National Olympic Academy Award, Rome (first prize); Iceberg Prize 2005, Bologna (first prize); National Arts Award 2003, Rome (first prize). He is professor of Anatomy of the image and Metodologia della progettazione in LABA, Libera Accademia di Belle Arti, Brescia.

Our project takes the words spoken by Jesus to Mary Magdalene in the garden after she discovers his empty tomb — noli me tangere (“touch me not”) — as a provocation for reflection on the COVID-19 pandemic, and on other pandemics, viral and social, that engulf us.