—after Joni Mitchell’s song and album Hejira
I used to sit on concrete curb stops, read about orphans traveling the same wood so often they named slight variations in the landscape, like an ancestor. I circumnavigate a nearby reserve, now, & can’t enter into each kind of curve with that love. I don’t know myself enough to name scapes I obsessively traverse. It’s become exercise, like a lot of modern effort. Like if I study a beloved story, I might tear it apart (tear it from my bra). Cartography kills. Worse happens when I teach it. A finger can’t actually travel along some route. Travel isn’t actually the beginning of rooting. But the road’s a refuge when every where’s a refuge. Might as well sit under a cool Coyote Willow near an Angeleno river. The tree is moving through space, too. Which is a story. A circle moving in a(n ovoidal) circle. All motion is through. & rooting sounds like the Hejira album image—like the wake of Jaco Pastorius’s fretless bass en route through Joni Mitchell’s black cloak. Bass notes root a song. &, though we are eternal, we are born rooted. Latched, in spirit, to an original home. Unlatching when we think we know better (which isn’t the same as death). Being isn’t the same as sitting in the cool of the beloved—which is: a story. In a Lisbon hostel, the hostelers sat at the common table & one-upped each other with travel hacks, with which crumbling city they’d moved through that Summer. Their checklists were epic. (I felt the sound of each dopamine hit as they checked their bits of history.) Their chatter made me want to say, “I haven’t been anywhere.” That I was born on the spot. &, I hate take offs & landings a bit less than in the beginning. I hate dry eyes & cramped hips on road trips. I don’t get seasick if I sit very, very still. Trains are boring outside of movies & dreams (but I repeat myself). & in Hejira, there are cheery songs about overdosing deaths. About never being the one—for anyone—as if that’s real or fine. As if love’s a destination. Am I drawn to the sound or the escape? What I hear in Hejira is a bird landing
in a nest full of
hatched eggs. Each beak is empty.
A rooting story.
About the Poem
This poem is in the form of a Japanese haibun which consists of prose blocks interspersed with haiku verse segments. Haibun are traditionally about travel so it made sense for me to utilize this form to explore the notion of a work of art (poem, story, song, etc.) as a vehicle conveying a reader on a worthy journey. Additionally, this poem is in the form of a saturation because it was written under the influence of a series of obsessive encounters with Joni Mitchell’s song Hejira (a word which can mean travel or escape with honor). The title is, in fact, a line from that song.
About the Poet
Jennifer Jean’s poetry collection The Pacific is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2027. Her other collections include: Where do you live?, VOZ, Object Lesson, and The Fool. She’s edited Other Paths for Shahrazad: an Arabic/English Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Arab Women. And, she edits the Songs for Fairuz: New Arab Women’s Poetry series for Black Ocean Press. Her poems, co-translations, and essays appear in: POETRY, Rattle, The Common, Poetry Northwest, On the Seawall, and The Slowdown. She organizes for the Her Story Is collective, teaches at Solstice MFA, and manages online learning at the Fine Arts Work Center.
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