Roy Jacobstein

The finches must be migrating North again.
There ! someone points, and at last I see it

in the quivering backdrop of backlit leaves— 
and immediately I think of my mother 

because it's the color she called chartreuse, 
looking up at me from her magnifying glass 

and sheaf of French exams to affix that word 
to the '58 Chevy my father brought home. 

Everything was a forest then, impenetrable
as the upper Amazon, our modern parents 

raising us beneath the icy aegis of science:
it wasn't pee-pee and poop, it was urinate

and defecate, penis and vagina, yet never
a hint of the mechanics or mess of sex, so 

what else could I do but attend med school 
to learn left supra-clavicular notch 

was the name for that soft indentation above 
the collarbone whence I'd thought for years 

babies must come, knowing even then 
they must come from somewhere deep
 
within the woman's body. Yes, it was all
so abstruse, but now my dictionary yields

memory's precise hue—it's a clear light green 
with a yellowish tinge, color of the aromatic 

liqueur made by the Carthusian monks 
at Grenoble, France, and you ease its top 

shoulder down and bottom shoulder up 
to guide it safely from the birth canal, out 

into this numinous world of sun and finch, 
Amazon and oak, of stillness and motion, 

nest and migration, of source and shadow,
instrument and accident, of holding on 

and letting go.


Copyright © Roy Jacobstein All rights reserved

Prairie Schooner, 2000