Jeffrey Thomson is a poet, memoirist, translator, and editor, and is the author of multiple books including the memoir fragile (Red Mountain Press, 2015), The Belfast Notebooks (Salmon Poetry, 2017), The Complete Poems of Catullus (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and the edited collection From the Fishouse (Persea, 2009). Half/Life: New and Selected Poems comes out from Alice James Books in 2019. He has been an NEA Fellow, the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, and the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellow at Brown University. He is currently professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington.
Achilles in Jasper, Texas
By Jeffrey ThomsonAdded: Wednesday, July 16, 2014 / Thomson's poem took First Place in the Split This Rock 2008 Poetry Contest. Special thanks to the contest judge, Kyle G. Dargan, and to Mary Morris and James Honaberger for their role as first readers.I know this: a man walked home drunk
along the corduroy of pines
in east Texas, the bronze duff andthe dust and the late light that fell
on him. Three men gave him a liftthat afternoon and raised him
with their fists and lowered
him with their nigger this andnigger that and after a while,
when all the fun they could havewith him leaked out into
the ruts of a logging cut,
they tied him to the boathitch of their truck and pulled
away. I know he kept his head upawhile because his elbows were
ground to the bone; I know enough
was finally enough, and his headleft his body behind,
but I don’t know what to dowith this, America, this rage
like Achilles twitching
Hector behind his chariotfor 12 days until even
the gods were ashamed.