Roy Jacobstein
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Time and Again
If you don’t write it all down,
it disappears. It’s 1962, Linda
is the most popular girl’s name,
Linda is one, no man has yet
moonwalked, JFK is tanned,
not yet an airport, the second
hand traces an arc of 90 degrees
in geometry class, 180, 270, I am
bisecting a right angle, I am turning
fourteen, Post Junior High, Detroit,
Miss Chavey (Ruth) is asking us
do we know the answer, I don’t know
what I will do later today but I know
one summer I will become a spot welder
at Dodge Main, the gray metal panels
moving down the line will become cars,
the carboys that move down the line
will fill with scrap, I will become
a doctor, the life I won’t save at Strong
Memorial Hospital will belong
to Danny Hammond and Timmy Lydon,
who won’t be born without two genes
for cystic fibrosis, I won’t rock
David’s cradle for fourteen years,
won’t meet Linda in Istanbul or run
my fingers along the arc of her breast
for fourteen more, won’t hold
Sophie-Anne’s hand at the intersection
of Columbia and Airport for seven
again, won’t win on Jeopardy!, won’t stop
the war, won’t invent the Internet,
you look again at the elm tree budding
in the pale April sun, the sun parting
for a moment the thick cumulus clouds,
the metal-laden carboys moving
down some other assembly line, look
at your mother who taught French
and was almost legally blind
from the trachoma that almost sent
her back to Poland from Ellis Island
in 1920 when she was four, or five,
and who hummed La Vie
en Rose to the small boy at her knee
as she peeled potatoes for pommes frites,
who fetched him from Palmer Park
thirteen years later when the riots
blackened the flawless summer sky
the year before he ate his first croissant,
in Paris, on the Rue Galilée, the year
before MLK became MLK, first person
second person third no matter
the glittering and sonorous particulars,
write it all down, it still disappears.
Egg Cream
—for Gerald Stern
O Leviticus, O Samuel, O Aunt Bea,
do you believe how little things
have changed, garter snakes and fleabane,
the color vermillion and the smell of rain,
and how the limbs of the living
and the dead soon stiffen.
And Label, the rabbi’s son,
do you know where he ended up,
and did his accent abandon him,
and can he get a good egg cream?
And if you do, can you send word—
I just remembered I owe him fourteen bucks.
And if you know how to get this poem to speak
in the voice of a whale or a falcon
or even a duck, a merganser, say, or a mallard
(one of those birds with teal tailfeathers
that waddle up to you when you’re scattering
bread on the pond), send that too,
I’ll be listening by the railroad tracks,
for all I get is this brief tickle at the back
of the glottis, even though I stir in coriander
and cardamom, Ming the Merciless
and Samarkand, hell, the whole Silk Road,
I’m trying to forget the scimitars and the heat-
seeking missiles, the canisters and Wagner
on the loudspeakers and no one bombing
the tracks to the crematoria, to put in a peony
or an oleander or a rose, but I can’t.
At Her Dull, Repetitive Day Job
She Thinks of Wallace Stevens
How did you suffer the surety
bond analyses, Wally, the arid
actuarial certainty undergirding
the premiums, metaphorically
rubbing epaulettes with those
for whom weather was never red,
beaches were barqueless, devoid
of phosphor, the mangroves
and the palms nowhere near,
the nothing there not there,
and there was only one way
of looking at birds of any color?
Bio
Roy Jacobstein’s latest book of poetry Fuchsia in Cambodia (Northwestern University Press/TriQuarterly Books, 2008). His two earlier books, A Form of Optimism (University Press of New England, 2006) and Ripe (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002) won the Samuel French Morse Prize and Felix Pollak Prize respectively. "Time and Again," "Egg Cream" and "At Her Dull, Repetetive Day Job She Thinks of Wallace Stevens" are from his current manuscript, Tell All the Lonely Gods.