Roy Jacobstein

That magnificent cascade of convenient paired plates-
not only were they his central heating and cooling, Jurassic 
to mid-Cretaceous, but countless 20th Century kids passed 
their lengthy laughing hour in museums great or small 
or in parks verdant or bare, sequestered snugly there. 
How many of the adults they've become must still possess 
their bronze or plastic replica, once boon companion
that shared bed and board and primal fear (of Allosaurus, 
T. rex—those implacable, giant-thighed, flesh-devourers, 
stalactite- and stalagmite-teeth ready to tear the instant 
Mom turned out the lights). 
                                        O Roof Lizard, stalwart
walnut-brained ten-ton friend, rotund muncher of fronds 
and leaves, state fossil of Colorado, what hath they wrought, 
these paleontologists bent on revision? They've made you 
more sleek, as if you'd been subjected to serial diet fads 
and they all took. They've shrunk your plates, wiped out
your stolid symmetry fore and aft by raising your hind legs, 
jacking up your underbelly from the soft green ground. 
We've lost the promise of your familiar body: Come, ride me 
into darkness, I will carry you and protect you with my many-spiked tail 
and lick your wounds clean with my grass-loving tongue.


Copyright © Roy Jacobstein All rights reserved

The Iowa Review, Winter 2005/06