If They Don't Have Ritalin in Heaven
I guess I'll be up there with all of them,
Allah, Krishna, Yahweh, God, speeding
along, shooting the shit with the Hims,
asking Him and Him do they too love
the names of these rivers the way I do,
Irrawaddy, Orinoco, Limpopo, Snake,
the banyans & cottonwoods & teaks
that overhang their banks, salmon & pike
that teem beneath—& isn't it great how
piano in Papuan Pidgin is big black box
with teeth you hit him he cry, & even though
the mosquito transmits malaria & dengue
& thus has vexed untold millions unto
this day, & the spirochete causes yaws,
aren't both elegant beings—the angel-
winged tuning-fork vibrato of the former;
the latter so sinuous & svelte & beguiling
under the scope—& speaking of speeding,
what about that Audi Quattro, how it accelerates,
0 to 60 in 5.3 seconds (though you're definitely
playing dice with your life when you tool out
onto the Beltway into the morning rush,
flitting between those minivans & cement
mixers, 18-wheelers & SUVs), & if you stop
to think about it, what's the hurry anyway—
the Times reports 97% of American workers
say they'd quit their jobs in a trice if they hit
the lottery. (Me, I always play numbers
3, 17 & 1789, in honor of Saint Patrick
& of Voltaire, Rousseau & the other lights
of the French Revolution, those philosophes
sans whose Rights of Man we'd be spinning
purposelessly atop the fragile tectonic plates
atop the hissing molten core.) I guess it'll take
a week or two for me to get back to the Hims
(nary a molecule of Ritalin lacing the cocktail
that is my blood), but when I finally arrive
maybe I won't shoot the shit after all, not
babble about the baobabs, the Monongahela,
maybe I'll just sit still there & regard
the dread shape, the fearsome visage
(cross between an Ayatollah & a Mather,
I imagine, proving the imagination
is influenced unduly by the news media
& by high school), & for the good of all
I'll stare into His remorseless eye & enquire
if indeed the Existentialists had gotten it right,
He'd created this world, then given it up, cast
His lot elsewhere, out there past
the moons of Pluto, sick as He was
of our whining & scribbling & warring—
though admit it, didn't He sometimes miss
the water hyacinth floating swiftly along
the Mekong after the rains, the ineffable
downward curve of the weeping willows,
the intoxicating scent of jasmine at dusk,
Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A Major,
& the dinosaurs.
Copyright © Roy Jacobstein All rights reserved
The Gettysburg Review, Autumn 2005
Special Mention, 2007 Pushcart Prize anthology