Jake Sheff is a pediatrician in Oregon and veteran of the US Air Force. He’s married with a daughter and a crazy bulldog. Poems of Jake’s are in Radius, 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 and short stories have been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize. He’s also published translations of poetry and reviews of translated poetry collections. SurVision selected three of his poems for Contemporary Tangential Surrealist Poetry: An Anthology. A full-length collection of formal poetry, “A Kiss to Betray the Universe,” is available from White Violet Press. He also has three chapbooks: “Looting Versailles” (Alabaster Leaves Publishing), “The Rites of Tires” (SurVision) and “The Seagull’s First One Hundred Seguidillas” (Alien Buddha Press).

Reading Darwin and Thinking About Ovid

_{“All creation or passage of non-being into being is poetry…”} 

• _{Diotima, Plato’s Symposium}

_{“The fact is that pictures which are unlike reality ought not to be approved…”}

• _{Vitruvius, De architectura, Book VII, On the Decadence of Fresco Painting}

It’s good to see a great one wrong;
It means one less impediment
To thinking for oneself. Cement
Inside one’s heart can be too strong
To break or mended with a song; 
That is, the soffits are too soft.  
When told what books to mock, we laughed;
A treeless forest shuddered. (Trees
Grow best when tall tautologies
Are stocks on which they’re each a graft.) 

Repeat a word, it loses sense; 
Repeat a sound, it gains a tone;
Devonian at first, then stone. 
My unwillingness writes A Defense
Of Architecture; time relents…
I wish! Why can’t my character
As easygoing as a sphere
Be? Sturdy as are cubes and wise
Like cones, these tall tautologies,
One and all, lift their shirts and declare:

“Ladies, behold the evidence
Of that which is the road to heaven;
I speak of repetition!” Even
My inner essence – which resents
All change and calls it all pretense 
(A me that can’t be not-me would) –
Agrees that repetition’s good
For some things: time’s impaired demise,
Dasein, and tall tautologies
To name a few. If covid could

Become a beltless variant,
I wish it would! Not to belittle
Ovid’s tales or Kafka’s beetle,
But to create an element
Vitruvian and represent
A virus death avoids. What’s false
But unforgettable, a pulse
Requires (it’s not just apple pies
That fill our tall tautologies) –
Man’s wisdom has no windowsills. 

Thinking of Strasbourg in Gig Harbor

_{“Finally [the Guru’s pupil] was sent out into the world with the wise admonition that education came only one-fourth from the teacher, one-fourth from private study, one-fourth from one’s fellows, and one-fourth from life.”}

• _{From Will Durant’s “Our Oriental Heritage,” on Hindu philosophy and education} 

You’ll live forever in my footnotes, Brand.
All haters fly to hate, like water to
The roughest pleasure on a thirsty land.

Originality’s a blend that you
Could never brew; the blender’s force repeats
The roughest pleasure. Leave the matter to

A chrysalis-cum-crisis with receipts. 
“Galloping Gertie” laughs; so, flyting’s not
The roughest pleasure to a bridge with streets

In heaven. Fate’s a goat, but tartiflette
Obscures the horns. A reignited war’s
The roughest pleasure to an alpha bête;

If boredom reigned and death resigned, these shores
Would sure look different! In the afterlife, 
The roughest pleasure equals zero pours

Of vin chaud. This green cinnamon roll finds my knife
To be just as unnecessary as
The roughest pleasure. Holi sells my wife

Bright yarn (the madness in her beauty is
Contagious). The geese chase away their aches;
The roughest pleasure also flies in Vs 

Through the Black Forest. There, we learned what snakes
Round Gothic ashes, and it never hisses.     
“The roughest pleasure is a night at Jake’s

Library” is what my worn-out Lenin’s Kisses
Back home would warn this pile of used books. 
The roughest pleasure isn’t learning; this is:

To study surfaces where no one ever looks
And with a barber’s eye. Roosters here mansplained;
The roughest pleasure smoothed the roundest rocks

In Washington back then. But in the Rhineland, 
We smothered truthless smoke with my Chacom. 
The roughest pleasure piped up, “What a bland brand!”

A good life is spent making good things. (In mid-dream,
Did we switch dreamers?) Time, you can’t erase
The roughest pleasure from a mind; here’s “Rome*

A*d Ju*ie*” on a beat-up spine whose face
I can fill in. “The Christmas Market sells
The roughest pleasure at a crazy price; 

A hooker in St. Petersburg said, “Hell’s
Quite nice.”” That’s from your poem “A Czarist Cure.”
The roughest pleasure’s insecure. It swells

Sincerely here. Since early May’s not sure
To come, let’s gather everything that’s pure. 

Living in Bellevue and Believing in Louisville 

On the Bourbon Trail
After Derby Day,
Barley hears me neigh
Under barely real
Roses. “Break the seal –
Mind the Beaufort Scale,

Though.” We perlustrate
Ovals in the air
Near Old Forester. 
Living salvos braise
Blues at Stevie Ray’s –
Golfers salivate,

Holding drivers tight. 
Let the curtain’s tulle
At the Brown Hotel
Keep the scent of lunch
Secret; let’s go punch
Fatalism’s bright

Melancholy right
In the you-know-what!
Baseball’s largest bat
Trolls reality
Just like poetry
In the tall, dumb night

Of a barrel proof
Soul. At Heaven Hill,
History sits still.  
Jerry Seinfeld’s there; 
Tasting notes too rare
Make him more aloof. 

Memory chars a stave
With its jeweler’s loupe; 
Time’s no longer cheap. 
Bardstown’s lines are flat;
Poems flatline; fat
Trains haul grains to save

Dylan Thomas. Spring
Thinks of Frankfort’s range –
Floral to blancmange –
And its birthmarked fields. 
Our best suitcase yields
What revetments bring.