Visiting Memories

Posted on April 13, 2025 Posted in art, Art, Culture, jas. mardis, love, Mardis, MardisArt, memoir, storytelling, womenTagged family, fishing, nature, outdoors, travelLeave a comment

for Anne

I am awkward at love. Even now, at the age of sixty-three with an unwed son and daughter and an already remarried, impregnated and divorced again ex’s, I am thunderously awkward at holding down a woman in my life for more than ninety days…tops. I am better at fishing. Last July the two conditions came together when I met a young widow and discovered that she had never been fishing. Not as a child and not as a college athlete or post college newlywed or in the ensuing 30-odd years of wedded, child rearing and subsequent disillusioned early demise of her spouse. So, ready to win her heart with the smell of worms, minnows, Blue gill and largemouth bass, I brought her out to an enclosed City pond and took her heart on the roller coaster that is first-fishing-at-fifty!

The city pond is just an acre and a half of water surrounded by playground, bathrooms and dotted every forty yards with those memorial benches and gates of the wandered-off loved ones. We began with baiting the hook and when to know the fish had bit; followed by reeling and squealing instead of yanking and tripping over the tackle and lunch boxes. Good thing, too because as soon as we lowered the line into the water and rested the rod against the railing it took off, bending the rod and lifting it nearly over to the pond! (insert spilled tackle box and rolling oranges, squashed grapes and smashed crackers).

The memorial bench on the walkway where we fished became my refuge for the next two hours as my friend lifted forty-three fish out of the pond. As a first fishing trip she quickly moved from a trembling bait toucher-to-a quick dehooking and self-baiting pro after the initial twelve red ear bream and powerfully built small mouth bass. I merely leaned back against the bench and snapped and eventual seventy three pics to document her prowess. She was kind enough to document my two very small bass of the day before we paused to eat lunch in the heat. Both she and the fish are pretty good dancers according to the photographs. Before leaving, she removed her head scarf/bandana and tied it around the arm rest of the memorial bench to mark the occasion and location to show her grown children later.

As for love, unlike the success of Jesus with the loaves and fishes, not even seventy-three fishes were enough to land me back in the throes of love and we parted ways Christmas-eve in the most awkward exchange of my dating life sagas.

I told as much to an elderly gentleman this morning as I fished and he stopped to visit three times before asking if he could sit on the bench with me for a minute. He smiled and laughed with me at the idea that I was returning to warm up the area for another shot at love-by-blue gill this summer. He agreed that it was worthwhile and even offered to ask his “lovely wife” to do what she could to boost my post-fishing luck with a new friend. I paused when he offered her services and asked if they lived in the surrounding neighborhood for her to swing by a pie or a plate of sandwiches to help my love game.

“No…no, she’s recently passed” he offered and moved aside my jacket to touch the name plate behind. “She’s been listening and laughing at your story. I’m rather sure of it!”, he mused with tears coming into his eyes. “She always loved a good story and you tell it pretty good”, he said, moving his touch to the date below their names, “1965”. “We met in high school and attended College in Oklahoma together and married our senior year. Two kids came after almost eight years later and we have just one grandchild. It’s a sixty year love affair, Mister Sir. I’m sure if you keep bringing your potential sweeties here to fish my Anne will whisper a hint to their hearts to help you out.”

He stood, wiped his fingers gently over her name and said, “I better take off since crying probably won’t help you catch any more fish”, and then headed off down the walking path. No other fish took the bait and the sun grew too hot for anything but packing up and leaving. On my way to the car I read the bench placards and wondered if they get visited, too. A soldier. A son. A full family and a favorite dog are among the memorial benches on that park. As for me and memorials, I really had to admit that I don’t return to the park and that bench, set into the curve of the walking path, in the hope of fish. I honestly stop trying after my second smallmouth bass. I squeal inside myself and dance a pointed-toed jig, with my rod squeezed between my knees and let the fish dangle and wiggle and jump itself into loops before reclaiming my hook and returning the monster back to the tiny sea. Then, I take my knife and notch the rail just in case my last chance at love comes by to remember the spot where we caught a day of joy.

JAS

Grasping

Posted on July 2, 2024 Posted in Art, black men, Culture, eyes, jas. mardis, love, MardisArt, poetry, Poetry and love, poetry posts, womenTagged Black Writer, Jas, jas. mardis, Mardis, Poetry, Writing2 Comments

(For “Me”)

There are so many

things to tell you

so many more things

than hairs on your head

so much more about why I

wait to grasp your long fingers

between my shorter ones

between what feels like years since my last grasp

between what has been years

of knowing hands should be held

so that we can match heartbeats

so that we can have

rhythm

so that our bodies

will want to dance

so that our arms will accept our caress

so that our tongues can taste unspoken pleas

so that our hips should give unto our weights

so that our laces

want to be undone

It takes forever to know

touching

and years upon years to surrender

its power away from the larger, hungrier body

with its useless squeezing and sweating

well into the graceless midnight hours

but that forever ends

and flows like streams into our finger’s tip

and puddles and pools and passions there

until there is a reaching

a wanting

a resting palm to tumble into

and

stir the trembling waters

afire aflame again anew

between kindred souls

Jas

“4Me”

Morning Coffee

Posted on March 18, 2023 Posted in arkansas, art, Art, black men, Culture, folklore, jas. mardis, love, Mardis, memoir, poetry, Poetry and love, storytellingLeave a comment

Leather pyrography portrait by Jas Mardis

     There is a place in my throat
for when the coffee has turned cold
    for when the beans are reclaiming their shape
     and, like freed men,   begin to search out their broken kin
   like fools think it will be in Heaven
  and that somehow there will be a mist of Grandma
      holding a pan of warm bread or a bowl of second slain beast stew

   And my swallowing is stopped at the tongue
       and I make a bowl to cradle the lacking brew
    and I can see my Grandfather’s thin lips blowing over his saucer
          of poured out   percolated   early morning   liquor
   that still wafts and wakes the most loved place of my entire known life
   until it calms into a mellow potion for my brother and I to fight over

       I beg my tongue to river that swallow into my throat
    like I begged my Grandfather not to leave
            and go over the hill where he broke open the earth
       where other men died and were swallowed by the dirt
where one man watched a Birmingham Steel girder slice his head apart
       where White men claimed splendor they did not put hands to

      Begged him to stay at that morning table
          where we fell asleep scrapping at his leftover grits   dry toast and runny eggs
    begged him to pick me to wear his scuffed and scraped hard hat
             that swallowed our tiny, boy heads
       and gave us echoes of his foot falls across wood floors
           and reverberations of the swooshing air thru the opening door
      and washed our blindedness with a screech of the screens hinges
            before being taken off and tossed into the station wagon

       And I tilt back my head
   like I did as a boy    and wait for the whiskered kiss
      of my Grandfather’s cooled breath
   to push the last of this morning’s brew into my remembered
                unaged soul

Jas Mardis is a 2014 inductee to The Texas Literary Hall of Fame and a leather and fabric artist

My DaddyUncleCousinWifeNem

Posted on March 4, 2023March 4, 2023 Posted in arkansas, art, black men, Culture, folklore, jas. mardis, love, memoir, storytelling, women1 Comment

Negroes eating ice cream in front of hardware store Farm Security Administration Archive Lee Russell

On the phone my Uncle EJ is recovering from a coughing fit and I am confused when it morphs into a rasping laugh and his signature, “Ooooh, boy“, then, “Jr. you’d be surprised at how little distance there was back in those times between a man being your Daddy or your Uncle!” Again, he laughs so heartily that he has to fight off another fit of coughing, but eventually settles himself down. Another, “Oooooh, boy” follows and I wait patiently for him to explain.

On this call we have been talking about my failure to find the marriage license for my parents in the Union Parish Records Archive. I’ve been at this task for years and am calling him from a Motel room in Bueno Vista, Arkansas. “James Jr, you are not going to find that record anywhere in Arkansas because your Father had run out of Arkansas marriages. He come and got my ‘57 Chevy and ran Route 63 to that big Bridge right into Mississippi and Greenwood to get hitched.” I look down at the cell phone and imagine a hot rod chase with multiple grandpappy’s wielding shotguns and tossing empty moonshine bottles out of car windows. They’re probably yelling, “Git back here!”…Again, my Uncle’s, “Ooooh, boy!” coughing and laughing fit brings me back to the present. I interject, “WHAT?!” “Unc, how do you run out of Arkansas Marriages?“

Those days, with my Uncle EJ leaning hard into his 89th year of life and no longer able to travel back home for the yearly grave cleaning and family events, my calls to his San Francisco, California home meant everything to us both. I have been recording these talks because of their tendency to go off the hinges. “James Jr, the Clerk of Courts wouldn’t write a new Marriage Bond to my Brother because he was officially still under his previous one!” …and there is a burst of energetic guffaw so strong that I don’t need the phone to hear it. The speaker distorts and crackles with the waves of exploding cackling and I wonder if I should offer to call him back later. There are a series of exclamations that include, “Oh Lord”, “Jesus” and various versions of “Son of a GUN”, along with the surprised calling of my Father’s first wife’s name, “Stella Mae”.

The pen that I have been scribbling notes with is now snapped and pouring a river of blue ink onto the notebook and surface of the Motel table. “Your Father and Stella Mae had run off from one another and that marriage about a year after getting hitched. Her Mother had signed off on it.” He ignores my question and continues, “That’s about the same time I met your Aunt Mary up at that lil club shack and was running back and forth trying to catch her again.” Again, he ignores my question and I start to wonder if I am talking or just thinking inside my head about what to ask. I catch the phrase, “Ooooh, boy, she was some kinda gal...” and this time I stop him with my actual voice, “WAIT! Who was “some kinda gal”? and he stops the memory, saying, “Who?“. Now, we both are confused.

“Jr. I’m talking about Rosel, now. We had come up to Camden and was running around on a Saturday night. I come up on a little ol’ thang who told me she was Mary’s older Sister, then she asked why was I out here calling her Sister’s name in the street like a dog?” “Ohhh, boy. I was standing about three feet over that lil gal and she had her fist cocked back when she come up to me”. In the Motel, I check the cassette tape for time remaining and hold on for the ride. I just went from not finding a marriage license to an unresolved separation, court clerks, an unpaid bond, my Aunt and Mother “in dem streets” and my 6’4″ Uncle about to get punched out by someone three feet shorter, but ready.

He picks up again, “Pay attention, James Chris. Yo Mother, well, she was still just a girl then, run me back up the road about asking around for her sister.”, He coughs, then continues, “An’ just before she lets loose on me…up comes J.C.!” I ask, feeling lost in the night’s events some forty years later, “From Where?!”We both laugh thru the speaker phone.

“J.C. had rode with me up to Camden and was having a pretty good time.” Uncle EJ calms down but there is a lifting in his voice. I ask, “So, they met because he had to save you in a juke joint from an angry midget?” and the phone again erupts from our guffaws. I follow up with, “Wait, where was Stella Mae?” and he snorts, “Most likely with her new fella back up the road in ElDorado!” When I remember to check the cassette recorder it was stopped, so I turned it over and tried to continue. My Uncle is a laughing mess on the phone and there is somebody knocking at his apartment door. Listening to digitized recording now I hear a woman’s voice say that she wants in “on this laugh party you are having“. On the phone my Uncle quickly wraps up the story by saying, “Well, James Jr, you can probably figure out the rest.” I ask, “So, did you and Aunt Mary ever get back around to each other?” and Uncle EJ responds, “Ohhh, boy. The next time I saw ol’ Mary was when Granny LaFears delivered my first niece about a year later. I gotta run, James Jr. See ya in the funny papers.“

The next day at the Archives I easily found the Marriage License for my Father and Stella Mae Coldure. On the license is permission granted by her Mother for the 16 year old to marry my 19 year old father. In the digitized archive is another surprise marriage record. I call my Uncle EJ early in the afternoon and when he answers I say, “So, who exactly is, Miss Tandy Oscar?” He holds the line for a few seconds then retorts, “Ooooh, boy, James Jr…seems like I’ve lost some memories since last we spoke...”

I Suppose It Is Time

Posted on May 9, 2021 Posted in Culture, eyes, folklore, jas. mardis, love, memoir, storytellingTagged death, social mediaLeave a comment

I suppose that it is time for such a thing to happen. The world has not completely stopped, just taken a sabbatical during the pandemic and virus recovery attempts. Along the way a lot of people have perished. Many of them from the virus and many others in the normal course of life’s medical tragedies that seem suddenly less than immediate, but just as certain as, well, taxes.

Photography with wood window and curtains--night lit view--Copyright JasMardis

I am in the vein of reality where mortality is upon me in a way that brings it all truly home. My spirit demands a sudden accounting of things as I read of the death of a former lover. Approaching my sixtieth birthday in July, an age that my Father did not reach successfully, I am pondering the absence of a woman with whom I once lay generously and passionately for hours and days without beginning or end. Her smile and warmth and coming alongside me in general conversations of daily being and faith explorations gave me a toe hold on the person that I am today. We once turned the morning into awakening with ravenous hungers and physical bonding before surrendering to the start of day. Even now, her body long gone from me; married and surrendering to a spouse; she gives me pleasure and expectation, as I page thru the mornings with others.

Gone. Dead. Passed. Deceased. Succumbed.

She called me not long before her death and asked if I still wanted a particular thing that we once found in a resale shop. It was right there; in her hand; rusted and seized up, as useless as the one we found over fifteen years ago on a lunch side trip. Next to the BBQ place, across a slanted parking lot with a slow-cranking, red and white sign and $30 box springs out front, the wide store windows burped with metal shelves and promise. We left the foil-wrapped food on the car seat and browsed for what she called, “another man’s trash”. Two aisles into our browsing she yelled out to me, “Got IT!” and ran to me with a Smith-Corona manual typewriter. “Fix it up and write me poetry. All for the low-low price of $10 …and rust dust on both our clothes and the back seat of my car.

Later that day, with the office abuzz with some manner of team building, maybe a baby or wedding shower that overtook the conference room, she called me with a request. “Can you come to my office? Well, actually. Can you meet me in the stairwell while this party is going on?” I headed straight over and rode the elevator up to the floor below her office and entered the stairwell for the meet up. She asked if I had written anything yet on the seized up device from lunch. “Nope”. She lifted her navy and white polka-dotted dress and I read, MUSE, written in White-Out on her thighs.

That’s where we found ourselves frequently for much of the next year. Getting caught by stair runners and pretending to share a quick smoke, before the days of twenty-five feet from the building entrance smoking areas. Soon enough the novelty of sneaking off ran its course and our lives succumbed to other relationships and marriages and our growing kids from previous relationships. But, still, she called, all those years later with a familiar tone across the phone lines. “I found another one. You want it? I can send it to you…or you can come get it (laugh). She wasn’t close. Our kids were making kids. That office building has long since started securing the stairwell with digital codes. I couldn’t take off in the middle of the day. I held onto the MUSE through numerous relationships. There were years to add to that story.

Social Media came around and phones changed into cameras and messages could be secreted to anyone at anytime. In the middle of the night I received her breasts and a recording about how much they would be missed. “But, you can remember them like this”. A little while later, months later, she asked for my body’s picture. Later still, she asked if I remembered the White Out; unlit cigarettes and the guy who watched from the next floor up.

In the mail one weekend was a manilla envelope. Inside a sandwich bag was littered with slivers and squares of nylon, silk and cotton fabric that had been sprayed with perfume and had a Victoria’s Secret tag taped to the outside. No return address needed. There were twenty-two pieces: it had been twenty-two years since we last touched. I did not reach back to confirm or celebrate or figure out a flight to nowhere. I put the whole thing in my side table and waited out the unavoidable.

I really do hate Social Media and the insensitive nature of calling out the dead. Memorials of life started populating my timeline within the next few weeks. I guess nobody knows that you are leaving behind lovers when laying hold of your image and videos of your voice…laughter…wedding…graying into a sexy grandma. There is no reason to consider who kissed the dead or found them in delight…read their thighs…felt their breath and bite and exhale.

The ways of the World do not consider your becoming years or fathom a guess at the worth and waning melody of finding yourself suddenly mortal. Unlike a parent or relative; elderly or neighborhood or College roommate’s passing, the first time you lose a lover is a sobering affair. Your bodies are forever linked with shared muscle and fluid exchanges. There is grace and homecoming ending forevermore. And, there is an upturned calendar, hourglass and ticking…ticking…and time running toward you, now. Suddenly, it is possible that you, too, could breathe no more into the memory of someone special.

.Jas Mardis is a 2014 Texas Literary Hall of Fame inductee and a Fabric and Pyrography Artist .

Final Natl-Poetry-Month Poem: How Sweet It Is… (audio and text)

Posted on May 28, 2020 Posted in love, memoir, poetry, singers, singingTagged Dallas, I'll Never Hear the Bells, jas. mardis, Library of Congress Prints, national poetry month, Poetry, THE DELLS, The ORIGINALSLeave a comment

Audio: How Sweet It Is

How Sweet It Is…

I want to sing
not just that hand moving vocalizing from American Idol tryouts
but sing in a way that makes men wait to go pee

when the alarm has gone off and it’s me on the radio
and the morning is still cold on the other side of his woman
and she is barely making a sound
but her mouth is a smile
and her hips are exposed from beneath and around her gown

and I’m chiming something from The Originals

and I don’t even care that it’s four-part harmony
’cause damn he’s looking over across her curves and sweetness
and remembering a few nights ago that should have been last night, too

and she’s curling her shoulders into the full light of day breaking across into the room

and her leg straightens and the gown just gives up

and there is something rising in the air on the sun’s rays and in the mist of dust
and there are all kinds of “yes” in the way that she opens her eyes to him

and the covers and pillows fall into line

and there is nothing to be said with words
not even that line about “gonna be late for work”
because I’m on the radio

and what they HEAR when I sing: “DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR”
is “I’ve been missing you since yesterday night”

and what they FEEL when I sing: “WHEN YOUR LIPS ARE KISSING MINE”
is, “Yeah”

and what they KNOW when I sing: “DO YOU HEAR THE BELLS, DARLING”
is, “All I need is five minutes to show you”

and what they DO when I sing: “DO YOU HEAR THE BELLS RINGING IN YOUR EARS, BABY”
is ask, “Can we turn that up a little bit, then?”

…”OH, I’LL NEVER HEAR THE BELLS….OH, I’LL NEVER HEAR THE BELLS…
NO, I’LL NEVER HER THE BELLS WITHOUT….YOU, BABY”

How sweet it must be to sing

Jas. Mardis (04/2015)
National Poetry Month 2015

**Click here to see The Originals sing their hit song properly

Jas. Mardis is a 2014 Inductee to The Texas Literary Hall of Fame, Multiple National Association of Black Journalist GRIOT Awards for Radio Commentary and a Pushcart Prize Winner for Poetry. He is Editor of KenteCloth: Southwest Voices of the African Diaspora (UNT Press). For booking information of poetry or The Family Story Project workshops–j.mardis@verizon.net or just send a reply from this page.

I Don’t Want It All Back

Posted on May 21, 2020 Posted in eyes, jas. mardis, love, Mardis, memoir, poetry, Poetry and loveTagged aloneness, flirting, Jas, jas. mardis, Mardis, PoetryLeave a comment

i-done28099t-want-it-all-back-.m4a

I don’t want it all back

just that one morning

when I put my phone on the bumper

and you wore that orange shirt dress

and shook your head

at the idea that everything was going to

work out

that the angle was right

not to cut off our heads

not to slip off the bumper

when the ten second timer hit

not to have a hundred shots of sky

on nights like this

in the middle of the moon

when the phone has six thousand pics

and only one

of big hair an ebony hue an orange blur

and endless

endless

blue sky

. (Oh, well…)

Jas. Mardis

Lily of the Valley

Posted on January 3, 2018February 20, 2022 Posted in love, poetry, Poetry and love11 Comments

Photo credit April Anue

Lily of the Valley

by now

we are clearly smitten

unsure of the end but certain of the path to it

all at once I understand something that others have wanted me to read

or at least the reason for so many to agree
it is a simple coming together

the rising voice of two people who know truly of love

somewhere along the way

their tongues have merged into a single song
you and I know it as kindred spirits

we already know what the hours ahead of us hold

so few minutes make up a night together

that we are both out of time before the clocks have run full circle
I want you to be sure of the brown bud

frozen outside your window

baked brown into a dormant husk in defiance of the driven snow

and laced poorly with the ice-cicled web of a lone spider
I want you to know that it is a bud of the Rose of Sharon

again cast against the shadows of another fair Maiden

the sun darkened lily of the valley

biding time in the season of bitter cold and frozen brambles
and so, let’s answer the question rising and falling within your breast

the one that begs at the corners of your mouth

the one that is awakening the unfamiliar craving tugging

riffling and running with your blood’s fire thru your soul
listen, Sweet, as I speak with a plan of love on my lips

with every intention of your flowering and blooming

of covering and protecting of comforting and pleasure

listen, like this bud in repose, for a strum of the web in your Winter
Our’s is not the Solomon Song

but You can be the dark maiden come in from the sun

breaking free from all of the known words of men and sisters

pressing your head gently to the thunder of my welcoming breast
you have been found

every whisper of your heart song is heard without need for reprise

each of your nights are calling for voluminous joy

endless is your destiny evermore becomes the only answer
and so to your soul I speak:

Lily of the Valley Rose of Sharon

do not bother with the brambles that have so long entangled ’round you

press into the shadow of their brittle vein and thorns
come forward to my arms and favor

wipe the weeping memory of any binding rope

untie the warm caress within you

undress the trembling, waiting, loving, searching hopes.

Jas. Mardis 12/28/2017

Jas. Mardis is an award winning Poet, Commentator and a Fabric Artist living in Dallas, TX. Jas. Is a 2014 inductee to The Texas Literary Hall of Fame.