Poetry from Jake Sheff

Poem 1: 

In Memory of Donald Vruwink (Senior)

Your almanac was always breathing.

The heart’s imaginary twin

Will die. “We’ll all be lovely then,” 

You’d say. My bones are done, done reading

The soil. A clever fever’s scribbling

Its high opinion of the moon

On it. We’ll all be lovely, then

We’ll banish imitation’s sibling. 

The death of plethora seems tawdry

When thunder darts the dirt with thin

Flashes. We’ll all be lovely, then

Tornados will be riding shotty. 

Poem 2:

In Memory of Sol Sheff

Words are like eyes; we often fail

To see a thing until it’s said. 

Each poem’s a mental pyramid

That stands because of memory’s pull. 

The rough perfection of a gull

You stewarded in Jacksonville.

And in Milwaukee, there’s a thrill

That stands because of memory’s pull. 

The sun’s ushabti may console

An Army corporal on the beach

At dawn. You gave a crippled speech

That stands because of memory’s pull. 

Poem 3:

In Honor of Louis Pasteur

“The picturesqueness of human thought may console us for its imperfection.”

–       George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty

Nobody honestly reports

On the beliefs of others. Wolves

Explain what alchemy involves

To beakers blackened by beaux arts

You said that men who run from warts

Are like a bear that runs from fish. 

And logic’s like a petri dish

To beakers blackened by beaux arts

Your era loved what love distorts…

One cannot trust the naked eye

Which craves the novel modesty

Of beakers blackened by beaux arts.

Poem 4: 

Blackguarding Merles

You mock a dahlia’s faith in rain

And March’s hieratic pain

In Wotan’s one good eye. I show

The only serious dog I know

The absence of a final task. 

(His bark becomes so plateresque.) 

Jocasta’s hardship melts the snow…

The only serious dog I know

Is on precocious wisdom’s trail.

Your apperception tugs his tail.

For Tiresias, you set aglow

The only serious dog I know. 

Poem 5: 

Schtupping Philosophy

After Mark Strand

“If only it were so easy to soothe hunger by rubbing an empty belly.” 

–       Diogenes the Cynic, on public masturbation

 “Qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête.”

–       Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Fear pats the propaganda on

Each head. Hate rubs the belly of

Hypocrisy. There’s Puppy-Love,

Schtupping Philosophy again. 

 “O, History, you’re not strapped for time,”

She moans while strapping me in wings.

Her drunken master drily sings:

“Schtupping Philosophy turns wine 

To dust!” When we extremes do meet

In bed, what’s born reveals our chains

And all but holy sweetness feigns. 

Schtupping Philosophy, one ought

To pause one’s speech, but not one’s thought. 

Play Water Music, let all see

The truth’s invisibility. 

Schtupping Philosophy brings out

Third eyes. This post-renewal age

Can’t fathom seasons. Anger warps

Each blossom, buzzing does each corpse…

Schtupping Philosophy onstage, 

I feel the sunlight’s bearded breath. 

The earth lets go of hardness. This

Gets harder moonlight, as does Bliss

Schtupping Philosophy to death.  

Poem 6:

Ode on My Daughter’s Bat Mitzvah (an Acrostic)

“If faith is the sail on a relationship, one with a broken faith is a hardship. What do you build a new sail with when your faith is broken? Hardiness. Jacob is hardy… Hardiness is not the same as hardness. The ‘i’ in hardiness is a reaching hand; hardiness strives, it reaches through hardness.” – Madeleine Sheff, from her d’var Torah

Do not too aggressively light upon

Adulthood, nor too agreeably go 

Usurp its tumultuous limits. Snow

Greets every shoeless shaliach whose crown,

Humility, isn’t the brownest brown. 

Take Laban, who wears mankind’s to-and-fro

Every season, and his deceptive chatter

Richly to the bottom of Jacob’s ladder. 

Of intellectual hatred, we’ve Yeats

For removing any gray gratitude

(Tantamount to cemetery gates):

Haunted by it, your life’s just a bladder

Emptied at the bottom of Jacob’s ladder. 

Comedy’s cruelty makes men brood.

Oh, even tragedy must look away.

Muteness sympathizes with nature’s food;

Made wingless in wine glass novels by day,

All of it runs full speed from decay. 

Normal Saturdays are mad as a hatter

Dimmed by the shadow of Jacob’s ladder. 

May the chuppah embrace each ah! bright ray

Eternal nature absorbs from your frame. 

Nouns have more beauty than verbs; don’t name

This place Terra Terribilis then shatter

Seraphs at the bottom of Jacob’s ladder. 

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