Rob Jacques: “This Rustic Eden”

Photographers Unknown, This Rustic Eden

. . .hills are turning
curved green against the astonished morning
sneeze-weed and ox-eye daisies
not caring I am a stranger
—-Audre Lorde

A pilgrim moving through on my way
to Wherever or Hereafter, I pull off I-90
into a town whose trees are flushed gold
with autumn, whose one white church
is washed honest and pure in stark fall light,
whose main street is paved with nostalgia,
and I park beside a roadside apple stand,
D’Arcy Spice, Irish Peach, and Silken
in bushel baskets above broad wood boxes
of Granny Smith, Gloster, and Ruby Grand.

I’m 17 again and just as innocent and good
as this rural town. A lanky, blond boy
with ice-gray eyes adds spice to this miracle
of a day, his face youthfully beautiful, and
I smile my greeting as I pick several Pippins
from a box in front of him and think I’d be
blessed to live free in this rustic Eden
without a care from urban storm and stress
as this boy turns away spitting, “Faggot!”
into autumn’s sacred, apple-fragrant air.

—-Rob Jacques, Every Traveler Has One Idaho Poem

Currently residing on a rural island in Washington State’s Puget Sound, Rob Jacques was raised in northern New England, after which he graduated from both Salem State University and the University of New Hampshire. He served as an officer in the US Navy during the Vietnam Era and has completed a civilian career as a technical editor and writer for the US Navy and the US Department of Energy.

Jacques has taught literature courses at Northern Virginia Community College, Olympic College, and the United States Naval Academy. Strongly influenced by the works of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and James Merrill, his poetry explores the metaphysical aspects of life and love, which include the paradoxes that develop as flesh and consciousness interact through one’s lifetime.

Jacques’s “War Poet”, published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2017, is a collection of poems related to his experiences while on active duty in the US Navy. Full of erotic and martial intensity, the poems create a lyrical memoir out of the poet’s time serving as a gay man in the military. Exploring the complex intersections between violence and sexuality, Jacques’s poems alternate between wild abandon and formal rigidity. His work recognizes the self as a primary center of conflict, a body which is charged with understanding the conflux of love and war.

Rob Jacques’s second book of poems, “Adagio for Su Tung-p’o: Poems on How Consciousness Uses Flesh to Float Through Space/ Time”, was published by Fernwood Press in December of 2019. Jacques uses Su Tung-p’o’s poetic lines as epigraphs to introduce his own metaphysical work which looks at the human issues, addressed by poet Su Tung-p’o in the eleventh century, with a twenty-first century perspective.

Rob Jacques’s poetry has appeared in regional and national journals, including Prairie Schooner, Atlanta Review, American Literary Review, The Healing Muse, Poet Lore, and Assaracus, a quarterly print journal which features the work of a wide representation of gay poets. 

Note:  For readers who are interested in LGBTQ fiction and poetry, I recommend the publisher Sibling Rivalry Press, the home of the Undocupoet Fellowship and a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a nonprofit arts service organization: https://www.siblingrivalrypress.com