Roy Jacobstein

Autumn Geometric

Must be another whitewashed wafer’s
slithered through the slot of the celestial
jukebox: a drachma or piastre or shekel,
coin of the realm in some sere yet ever-
inhabited ancient land. Enter the theme,
borne on strings—bouzouki or oud—
dark fingers schooled in the eternal
minor key of rain, dust, and olive tree.
Heat rises, worlds turn, leaves shudder
in wind, apples fall in the fullness of fall.
And in any of this Earth’s thousand
lacerated, lacerating tongues—in field,
souk, or shopping mall—skin of the fruit
yields to the teeth and the flesh concedes
its juices that slide down your throat.

ROY JACOBSTEIN is the author of Ripe, selected by Edward Hirsch as the winner of the 2002 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, and the Randall Jarrell Prize-winning chapbook, Blue Numbers, Red Life. His poetry has recently appeared in or is forthcoming from Parnassus, Prairie Schooner, The Threepenny Review, Witness, and elsewhere. He is a public health physician and former official of the United States Agency for International Development. When he is not consulting in far-flung places such as Tallinn, Istanbul, Kathmandu, and Phnom Penh, he lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

“Autumn Geometric” first appeared in our Summer 2001 issue.

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