Roy Jacobstein

Would it have helped if I'd known swale meant a low-
lying or depressed and often wet stretch of land? Maybe 
I'd have understood her moistures and stoops, though 
the word is of Scandinavian origin and I am not. Ah, origins. 
I swear we make a mountain of a few inches, a few cells. 
If not a mountain, a hillock, a rude mound. Clit or cock, 
ermine, stoat, aren't we all just topiary anyway, on the road 
to the inner harbor? And speaking of pruning, why did it take 
so many years to understand that sign? Every fifth Thursday, 
3:30 p.m., there it was, across from DOM & ERNIE'S, 
visible as a galaxy of dust motes in a sun-shaft: We Repair 
Non-Union Haircuts. Like a rune or sentence in need 
of a good parsing, I sat on the cracked red leather 
of the middle barber's chair, peering out at it, waiting 
to be spun around, voilà, again a Mexican Hairless, 
Dom and my mother doing their polka of delight, 
my brain backstroking in the bay of abstraction. True, 
its syntax is none too mystic, maybe it was the diction, 
how the hell should I know, I was only eight. Befuddlement 
ran deep in urban Detroit. Don't you love how b and d thud by? 
And who could forget Henry Ford's goons, there at the factory
overpass, the blood vessels bursting like boils from the worker's 
heads at the sight of the truncheons? Well, Dom and Mom could, evidently,
probably Ernie too, hard to say, being he was off 
Thursdays. Funny, later I was a Teamster, at the time of the riots. 
Local 199—had my union card, but how do we really know 
we've made the team? And what's the game, duckpins?  
And now that we're approaching the main theme here, 
what about the problem of pomegranates—they're so different, 
and they come from so far away. Aren't they just like relationships, extraction of each
insular seed (Lat.: insula, island) labor-intensive 
to the max. Cock, clit, haircut, union card, Latin, Old Norse— 
where does any of it get us, I ask you. It's all so damned runic.
Though have you noticed with Whitman Samplers, how 
the caramels are in one corner and the nougats in another, 
and you can see the curve of the cashews peeking through 
the bittersweet, saying in shards of cashew-speak, pick me.


Copyright © Roy Jacobstein All rights reserved

Mid-American Review, James Wright Prize, 1999