The Labyrinth, and: Cold Chop, and: Phlox, and: Passing Customs, and: Bad Buddhist

Abstract

The Labyrinth, and: Cold Chop, and: Phlox, and: Passing Customs, and: Bad Buddhist Roy Jacobstein The Labyrinth Four hundred years ago between vespers and lauds Sor Juana wrote spare, elliptical poems that hint of her ardor for another cloistered nun. Four centuries–– so much has changed: now we moan for love beneath the mutations of the moon. Why else does that dog beyond the casa window bay so? Place my pen in his paw, let me pace the stucco wall. He can lie supine on this bed of slate, roused by the ululating bells, trying to write you back to his side again with paw, bay, slate, moon. [End Page 25] Cold Chop Muzak overhead. He resists it long as he can, then discerns Somewhere Beyond the Sea, Oldie that unicycled his brain during its season of yearning for the unknowable and blithe object of his geek-teen crush. He wanted her by his side not his father and brother, the three of them at water's edge, skipping stones into the cold chop of Green Bay. Those futile throes shadow him still, casting their pall over every wave, lesson she taught in time and distance: you can ford umpteen zones, fly beyond any sea, but longing's always the hammer- head shark, and you, you're nothing but the pilot fish, ingesting the waste. Phlox And only in the light of lost wordsCan we imagine our rewards —John Ashbery, "The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers" Such light in the words, does it matter you're in the dark before the res itself? It's like when the Odorama machines faithfully reproduce the scent of sulfur or subway or Chanel No. 5, but you never took chemistry, or bid Muskegon adieu— [End Page 26] which doesn't mean the vibrations triggered by the chord pattern for freshly fallen snow fail to evoke precisely the faintly falling flutter, but that larkspur, loosestrife, foxglove, asphodel tickle your cingulate gyrus or corpus callosum or whatever plot of gray matter domiciles those axonal sparkings of linguistic delight in the castanetting ox-ox of gloxinia and phlox sans your having a clue if carmine or mauve also inheres, let alone whether the spring wind, chuffing across the ripening prairie, rustles pistils that loose a sweet scent over the oblivious herds of lowing cows. Passing Customs Returning home from Malawi (place my daughter calls meowie), I have nothing more to declare than the ten million who live there declare of the spit-polished virus goose-stepping through one in six adults: they say little, complain less, take solace in the lilting contrapuntal mix of electrified African rock 'n' roll upon which the people's power to exorcise the recurring specter of the week's goodbyes (husband [End Page 27] lover sibling parent neighbor friend) alone depends, for the storm troopers may be garrisoned, the funerals proper, so the bereaved can gather and grieve, prayer can be called, chanted, read, still the tracks to the crematoria go unbombed. Bad Buddhist Our house is infested with these tiny moths, annoying as they are harmless. Dancing madly in the evening light like I imagine dance the Gypsies their kin are named for, they converge upon me while I chop garlic, a plague of wings, brown & black & bad Buddhist that I am, anger flares like a burst of tracers in a night sky, so I do my best to kill all that I can. [End Page 28] A hard job, this eliminating your enemies one at a time & no matter how many you whack, more appear. No wonder we invented Agent Orange, not all that long after we dropped the Bomb. Roy Jacobstein's A Form of Optimism (New England) won the Samuel French Morse Prize. A set of poems from that book received the 2006 Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award.