Jake Sheff
Two Poems
The Prisoner’s Pastoral
You wouldn’t think to look at it, but Earth
is a perfectionist. The shepherd shears the sheep
down to their ruthless skin. The shepherd’s
lyre is morally electric, playing legless elegies
for me. The system’s less ashamed beneath
a sun just dying to see the dark. The river runs
like crazy in my family; hard and lazy. Time is
scarred, but getting power’s no good deed
among the bleating. Love is sharp, but has
the colors and contours of a tomato when
the cuckoos call. Forgiveness is a storm
on the horizon, frightening and shaped like
a horseshoe. Maybe in his shelter, someone’s
making love to howls. Or maybe in the rain
I’ll say, “I’m only consonants, and you’re
the vowels I need.” The earth soaks up
your grammar’s grime, but nothing rinses off
the crime, or puts a muzzle on the past. To bust
out of a bruised intelligence, the country folk
put on a play in masks, portray the short
and happy life of storms, which only know rebirth,
but to themselves are strange. “Big beginnings
have no friends,” they chant repeatedly, a punching
bag of words. They play the only game in town
the dead can win; a sort of art. No hats are blown
away; among inverted objects (there are so many!):
no umbrellas. But on the breeze –not given
to giving – meaning can be lost and found.
(The breeze can paint a portrait of an elderly man
as music if you ask it to.) The sheep are grazing,
but behind your back you see the girl from another
nature bathing. And time slows down, because
she’s naked. (It only speeds up when you are.)
You hear the voice of money in the trees; the trees’
machinery is sad, but good to know. The dogs
are barking at a shadow’s thrill. The light is
custard-filled, it won’t encourage you to blame
the world, or smash your lemons. Careful not to
offend the significant other of a friend, this feeling
never wakes to hear a woman say Yes, but with
an angel’s perfect rationale, counts sheep forever.
For Doña Gracia Mendes-Nasi
One of the wealthiest Jewish women of Renaissance Europe, she used her power and influence to develop an escape network which saved hundreds of Conversos from the Inquisition.
Elected in some other world, by waters
or hours wearing out your welcome, you
assimilated narrow smiles. (“What tears?”
you laugh.) Beneath your square of sky, the Jew
climbed iron spirals to your very tranquil,
metopic heart; a holiday in Ur.
I am your liquid declaration’s jonquil.
For I have seen state-sponsored moss inure.
You put the most intoxicating creases
in secret powers, strange subsidiaries
to love. Preparing for his next life, Croesus
disliked himself. Intruders’ diaries,
with somber, modern textures autumn eyes
in spring, you taught him fail to itemize.
Jake Sheff is a pediatrician in Oregon. He's married with a daughter and six pets. Poems of Jake’s are in Radius, The Ekphrastic Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Cossack Review and elsewhere. He won 1st place in the 2017 SFPA speculative poetry contest and a Laureate's Choice prize in the 2019 Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest. Past poems have been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize. His chapbook is Looting Versailles (Alabaster Leaves Publishing).