Roy Jacobstein

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Somewhere my father must be
eating the mooshy parts of a peach
as a favor for a child,
the way he once did for me.
May it be sunny there, and a lei
of light illumine his brow.
The years it's taken to learn sweetness
resides in the bruises.


Copyright © Roy Jacobstein All rights reserved
       

I call my film Still Life
with Platypus and Wind Chimes
because the us in platypus 
and the idea of a marsupial's 
pouch are both symbolic.
At least that's how I pitched it 
to the studio. But I lied—the film
has no platypus, no symbols, no wind
chimes. Just a twelve year-old kid
in a greasy spoon somewhere 
out West, patties of meat being
spatulaed off the spitting grill,
cigarette haze encasing the diners,
and he sees the frantic trapped
moth banging against the screen,
and we see the moth in extreme
close up, trying to get out, back
into the sweet evening air,
so the kid bolts from the red
leather booth, his family
eating chicken-fried steaks,
and makes for the screen door,
pushes it open, gently
flicks the moth back out
into Wyoming or Colorado,
sees it ascend, sees the black
beak of a bird zap it away.
Then we cut from his stunned
face to the busty waitress: 
the banana split is coming.


Copyright © Roy Jacobstein All rights reserved

Hayden's Ferry Review, 2004
Runner-up, Indiana Review Poetry Prize, 2004, Denise Duhamel, judge
       

If they're right, this mosquito dive-bombing my ear
into total presence at 3 a.m. is Rasputin, or your late 

Schnauzer or possibly (why not?) one of those spears 
of asparagus served at Cousin Dee's 83rd birthday 

luncheon last month, or even Cousin Dee herself, 
depending on karmic law and the minute particulars 

of the soul's transmigration (interval of dormancy,
if any, distance traversed in space and time, degree 

of ascent or descent on the biologic scale from mite 
to man, etc.), which means that among this newly

hatched crop of anophelines, who unimpeded live 
but a few days, and whose females alone bite, could be 

Shakespeare (spiraled down through the centuries) or 
the louse that once bit the arse of the unknown (to us) 

object of his affection in Sonnet 55, so on the chance
those who believe this sort of thing—a priori no less
 
nor more plausible than Red Seas parting or virgin
births or sun gods demanding sacrifice of human 

(preferably young and female) flesh—are right, 
I'll forbear from further attempts to squash what 

well may be Mohandas K. Gandhi, secure in knowing
should I come back as a cat I'll sleep soundly, curled 

upon myself on the soft couch while someone's 
cousin or mother or child circles overhead 

in her newfound brown body, shaking the last 
of her human tears from her glistening wings ...


Copyright © Roy Jacobstein All rights reserved

Marlboro Review, 1999 Marlboro Poetry Prize, Stephen Dunn, judge

                                                 "Deep Sea Mystery Solved"

They say, mi amigo, genus Architeuthis, 
giant male squid, you "measure 45 feet long 
and would make calamari rings bigger 
than a tractor tire."
                                 (Sautéed in olive oil, 
spread over a steaming bed of rice,
you'd sate a hungry battalion—lie low, 
mon ami, down there in your inky cavern, 
half a mile below the sizzling woks.)

They say you "use an extremely muscular 
penis, three feet long and functioning 
like a rivet or nail gun," that your "encounters 
are infrequent and chance." 

When passing a female "like two ships 
in the night" 
                    (apologies, my friend, 
for the unbounded human appetite 
for seafood and cliché),
                                      they say you "quickly 
maneuver to hammer into one of her arms 
and inject under hydraulic pressure,
your six-inch line of sperm 
undulating in the pitch."

At last they've captured the bare details, 
but what do the scientists know of squid-time, 
of how fast your waiting for her passes 
in the safe cold depths, 
and how love's tentacles hold. 


Copyright © Roy Jacobstein All rights reserved

Witness, 1999, Love in America issue

Wasn't it only yesterday father & son bent low 
      over two squares of sidewalk to play hand tennis, 
           volley the yellow fuzzy ball off their palms, curve
 
it away from each other toward the unmown lawn? 
      All those trips to the roundhouse, to sight the boxcars 
           clacketing west toward the sun. Dusk in Boulder meant 

Addis Ababa eyeing the moon, high in a starlit sky. 
      The family outing to the Anasazi ruins at Mesa Verde 
           was yet to come, now is past. My ride to the airport, 

once to come, is passing fast. This time the driver's 
     not an exiled Iranian economist, not a Nigerian chieftain's
           son from some wrong tribe, he's Abebe, named to honor 

Abebe Bikele, Africa's first Olympic champion, who 
      ran Rome's stone streets 26.2 miles, that precise distance 
           athletes ran 25 centuries ago at Marathon to Pindar's praise, 

but Abebe ran barefoot, as our Pleistocene ancestors 
      must have run (toward their prey, or prey themselves), 
           & four years later, now shod, in innocent Tokyo, 1964, 

again he inclined his neck forward, black swan 
     accepting the victor's gold (less than three years 
          until the car crash will paralyze him, waist-down). 

He was so tall & handsome, his namesake says,
      & now the women of my country win too, leading me 
            to Cleopatra, what she looked like, & the asp, 

which breast it bit, how long it lingered there, 
     how long the poison took, & those wind-borne 
          dhows, do they still ply the eternal Nile (pyramids 

& bulrushes & crocodiles, riven green ribbon 
      slicing the desert, crotch to crown), & that busload 
           of German tourists, were they slaughtered before 

or after they saw the Temple of Karnak & why 
      is the Lower Nile above the Upper, at least on maps
           of our one known home—& when the plane lands 

in a new time zone, & a refugee or a refugee's son 
     from Algeria or Cambodia drives me past the Ford plant 
          where I worked in '76 (summer welder among the lifers) 

onward to William Beaumont Hospital, Royal Oak,  
      Michigan, will my father's bony hand still be clutching 
           his IV pole, the piss-yellow chemo ripping into his veins, 

will any of his once-black hair remain, will he still
     recognize me, & if I keep at it forty-three more years 
          can I make a work of art, even beauty, from this jumble 

we call the world—yellow balls & summer lawns, temples
     & tourists, exiles, IV poles, crocodiles—& may it stay 
           the confusion & the madness, Lord, if not the clock.   


Copyright © Roy Jacobstein All rights reserved
       

Mr. Gardner in 10th grade told us there was no purpose
to mitochondria, just function. Your lungs turn black 
in a day if you smoke, black as that ink streaking 
your sorry hands, thundered bald Mr. Strepek in Print Shop, 
and stay black five years, even if a cigarette never touches 
your lips again, and your breath stinks too. But Karen took 
Home Ec., so she kept flicking Virginia Slims from the pack, 
blowing onion rings into my face. Miss Testasecca taught us 
the tangent is a function of the right triangle. Miss Piilo 
made us memorize atomic numbers. Uranium: Number 235—
no wonder it's radioactive. Pb, sign for lead, stood for something 
like plumbus in Latin—or was it Greek? After semester break 
she came back as Mrs. Giglio. Lily, she told us it meant 
in Italian, turning to write a formula on the blackboard, 
tugging at her tightened skirt. Things are getting tougher 
all the time, Chucky Klein quipped. Years later he got 
himself shot reporting Jonestown, survived, moved to TV. 
I want to ask old Mr. Curran right now, How come The Lord 
of the Flies has to have Piggy drop those glasses and why 
did that 17-year-old leave her newborn girl in the dumpster 
last week and what'll they do to her now? Who's the rough 
beast he'd say in that brogue that caressed us like the tongue 
of a cat. Some days you just want to be toes, curled inward 
or pressed against another warm body until first recess crawls 
by—then Mr. Adamson's supposed to teach us how to shift 
from second to third and accelerate into the straightaway.


Copyright © Roy Jacobstein All rights reserved

Witness, 2000, Crime in America issue
       

Despite the droplet,
the melted cascade, 
the river remains 

the river. Ever
just beyond reach
of the known nectar,

the white rats cycle 
the wire cylinder 
in the wire cage.

The Scientist remains 
absent. The raw liver
of Prometheus, torn 

at by the innumerable
raptors that is one
raptor. End no end. 

No end end. End end
no. Never could any 
of us believe Sisyphus 

content, though long 
we'd tried. Addition 
gets one nowhere.


Copyright © Roy Jacobstein All rights reserved
       

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