Roy Jacobstein
How to Thrive in the Office Cube
Make peace
with the space
you’re dealt, be
a beacon
of equanimity
and competence,
set out
the photographs
of Dad, the dog,
the day
you sailed
the blue bay.
With respect
to your voice, don’t
lower it
more than two octaves,
though it will
behoove you
to call
your new lover
from a private phone.
And instead,
should he
call you, say
“Mon ange,
your eyes are
the glowing coals
in the blast furnace
that is my heart,”
you must respond
coolly
with “Yes,
Steve, the report
is coming along fine
and will be available
for your perusal
by COB today.”
Such dispassion
has useful spill-
over: the dry cleaner
will give you the discount
even though you forgot
the coupon.
The mechanic notorious
for gouging
his customers
will fear you
know something
and not overcharge.
Your landlord will promptly
repair the heat pump.
And your lover,
who may
or may not be
Steve, will take
your demeanor for
the deep still ardor
he has been meant
to unlock all his life,
beginning with dinner
at the little
Turkish place
where he will order
meze and raku
and ask you
“Are you always
this cool?”.
The Unknown Albeit, or While Reading
a Friend’s Prize-Winning Book on Love’s
Vicissitudes He Writes about Words
—for Robert Thomas
Rhachis, dumka, grisette, iku, kolache, azagur—
you’re doing it again, amigo, sending me
to meaning, avid as ever. So I enter aa
at www.Dictionary.com, find neither
anti-aircraft nor Associate in Arts, but lava
having a rough surface, though transmuted
in your hands to something glorious, black-
faceted, trillion-spined. Rolling, I enter trillion,
imagining hothouse blooms, forgetting
those 12 zeroes trailing the lonely one.
Well, who wouldn’t be confused by now,
being confronted by the unknown albeit
mellifluous mokihana, lovely double spondee
you’ve wed to Mt. Waialeale, a site looming
above a leper colony in Tonga or Vanuatu
or Fiji, no doubt, but leading me to desire
a dish of wahine … or is it haole? Never mind,
here comes szatmari, your next seductress,
flashing skirts, black boots, scarlet lace,
some ecstatic dance that sizzles and burns,
I surmise, for your book’s fiery and on love,
its tang and its char, the one subject I learned
to shun like it’s the electric prod, I’m the bum
steer—but even the e-reference is stumped,
though clueless it’s not, proffering
alternatives, crypto-homonymous kin. Thus
I’m queried do I intend Satu Mare, and lo!,
only a click away arises a medieval walled city
in Transylvania, setting for Stoker’s gothic horror
novel whose vampire lends his name to a bevy
of diminutive tropical plants (genus Draculae)
having bizarre, sinister-looking purple flowers
with pendulous scapes and hyper-motile lips—
which sounds a hell of a lot like the love
I would write about if I wrote about love,
which is why I don’t, but it’s sure good
to know when I reject Satu Mare
there’s still stammerer and stud mare
left for me to consider, and I am.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
“How to Thrive in the Office Cube” and “The Unknown Albeit …” are from Roy Jacobstein’s new 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.