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Jared Smith is the author of eleven volumes of poetry, including his Collected Poems: 1971-2011; multimedia productions based upon his writing in New York and Chicago; two CDs; and numerous publications in the applied sciences. His poems, essays, and literary commentary have appeared in hundreds of publications in the U.S., Europe, and China. Journals his work has appeared in include: Beloit Poetry Journal, Paterson Review, New York Quarterly, The Same, Poet Lore, Confrontation, Lummox, The Pedestal The Smith, Colorado Quarterly, Greenfield Review, Louisiana Literature, Ibbetson Street Press, Wilderness House Review, Fifth Wednesday, Chiron Review, and a great many others. He is a Board Member of The New York Quarterly Literary Foundation and is Poetry Editor of Turtle Island Quarterly out of Oregon. He has also served on the Editorial Boards of The New York Quarterly; Home Planet News; The Pedestal; and Trail & Timberline. He is listed in Poets & Writers, The Colorado Poets Center, Who’s Who In America, and other major reference sources.

Jared Smith.

The Salt Marshes

Beyond the doctor’s offices, real estate brokers. greasy diners,
beyond the houses, there were the salt marshes themselves
shifting back and forth, waving on all sides outside the town filled
with the smell of stranded fish and overabundance of clams,
broken shells, sandworms, bloodworms, fiddler crabs,
and the steel grey of herons wading waiting in the evening
knowing that from this flatness one could pluck flashes of silver
and carry them off into the sunset as if they had never been.

I got to know those marshes, as I knew the heavy smell of horses
that came to permeate my clothes, though they were not water horses
and had to be left tied to the bones of cypress knees at the end of the beach
when I wanted to wander halfway inland and roll up my pant legs, feel
the earth oozing up between my toes as I walked to the inner island,
more a raised sand bar than an island, but with vegetation, a tree
where ospreys landed in the daytime and a great horned owl at night,
where the bones of fish and rodents lay scattered in a bleached heap,
perhaps the leftovers of meals or the beginnings of land or both.

When the wind howled from the ocean or Town itself grew too close,
when the wizened stub fingered fishermen drank too much at the bar
and began bragging of all the things they had dredged from their nets
as the moon rose in the evening those marshes would be my shelter,
and I would walk out into them beneath the blank eyes of the owl,
and I would know that the grasses had eyes and the soil itself a soul.
This was separate from where I lived, of course, but it was there
contained within the rib cage of a vessel that knew the night unafraid.

— Jared Smith
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