Five Poems After Jack Siegel, by Mark Silverberg

Untitled, by Jack Siegel (Canada) before 2007

Two Women

The simplicity of line
how it carries itself
how you can carry it
in an instant, a pocket

Two women waiting
on a bench
as at a hairdresser
waiting to begin
We walk 
through the white borders 
of their possible lives

Open spaces puzzle
no more than their identities:
they are all of us
reduced 
to basic 
line

We will meet them tomorrow
amid shopping bags and odd hats
shoes that barely fit, 
stockings gone awry

And suddenly we will be their pursuers
their purse-bearers
their pall carriers

​

Untitled, by Jack Siegel (Canada) before 2007

It was always working in darkness,
even on the brightest days
at Nathan Philip Square 
where light glistened 
on the new skin of sunbathers,
it was always working 
in the darkness of ink.
Where does one find light 
if not in the space behind the page?
These lines were shaped for the homeless,
traced the shapes of homelessness,
felt the pulse of loneliness,
which is hardly any pulse at all.
A cigarette, an empty purse,
a hat misplaced in time.
I was riding a train of thought 
where there were no words but
only a hunger and a need 
to fill it with ink, 
to flood the bright spaces of the day 
with dark, innocent, 
half-formed line.

I was the beginning of all those people.

​

Untitled, by Jack Siegel (Canada) before 2007

Apple Still Life

Comes a certain point
when it’s hard to care for anything 
anymore, 
when lines are just lines,
people just empty shapes.
How often did Jack reach this point?
How often did just looking fail to move?

Maybe that’s when he added colour,
making the bowl a deep liquid blue,
the apple green a tarnished rust after rain.
Could he ever tire of looking at apples
in a bowl? of making 
a roundness 
of their roundness,
a space for them
to breathe?

As long as there are apples 
and nothing else
no empty house surrounding them
no footsteps leaving
or about to leave for good
he must have been ok,
he must have been able 
to turn shapes into colours
and colours into shapes
and to leave everything else
alone

Untitled, by Jack Siegel (Canada) before 2007

My job was to follow 
the lines of sorrow
behind the eighty-year-old face,
the face of a young girl. 

They can see 
beyond the veil
the ink 
is only 
another veil
broken
by spots
of light

Untitled, by Jack Siegel (Canada) before 2007

Tom Jones

When I was a sailor
things weren’t done this way
there was somewhere to turn to . . .

Dark tones give weight to the feet
tell us where they may have gone
ask us where we may 
be going

And the open collar,
a skin of possibilities:
his, just being formed
ours, the seemingly foreclosed, 
newly opened

He tells us not to be afraid 
for all our potential self
the smudge is not a warning
but a star

​Mark Silverberg
​

These poems previously appeared in the author's book Believing the Line: The Jack Siegel Poems (Breton Books, 2013). 

Mark Silverberg is the author of the Eric Hoffer award-winning ekphrastic poetry collection, Believing the Line: The Jack Siegel Poems (Breton Books, 2013). He lives and teaches at Cape Breton University in the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq People.