Roy Jacobstein

If They Don’t Have Ritalin in Heaven

I guess I’ll be up there with all of them,
    Allah, Krishna, Yahweh, God, speeding
        along, shooting the shit with the Hims,

asking Him & Him do they too love
    the names of these rivers the way I do,
        Irrawaddy, Orinoco, Limpopo, Snake,

the banyans & cottonwoods & teaks
    that overhang their banks, salmon & pike
        that teem beneath—& isn’t it great how

piano in Papuan Pidgin is big black box
    with teeth you hit him he cry, & even though
        the mosquito transmits malaria & dengue

& thus has vexed untold millions unto
    this day, & the spirochete causes yaws,
        aren’t both elegant beings—the angel-

winged tuning-fork vibrato of the former;
    the latter so sinuous & svelte & beguiling
        under the scope—& speaking of speeding,

what about that Audi Quattro, how it accelerates,
    0 to 60 in 5.3 seconds (though you’re definitely
        playing dice with your life when you tool out

onto the Beltway into the morning rush,
    flitting between those minivans & cement
        mixers, 18-wheelers & SUVs), & if you stop

to think about it, what’s the hurry anyway—
    the Times reports 97 percent of American workers
        say they’d quit their jobs in a trice if they hit

the lottery. (Me, I always play numbers
    3, 17, & 1789, in honor of Saint Patrick
        & of Voltaire, Rousseau, & the other lights

of the French Revolution, those philosophes
    sans whose Rights of Man we’d still be spinning
        purposelessly atop the fragile tectonic plates

over the hissing molten core.) I guess it’ll take
    a week or two for me to get back to the Hims
        (nary a molecule of Ritalin lacing the cocktail

that is my blood), but when I finally arrive,
    maybe I won’t shoot the shit after all, not
        babble about the baobabs, the Monongahela.

Maybe I’ll just sit still there & regard
    the dread shape, the fearsome visage
        (cross between an Ayatollah & a Mather,

I imagine, proving the imagination
    is influenced unduly by the news media
        & by high school), & for the good of all,

I’ll stare into His remorseless eye & inquire
    if indeed the Existentialists had gotten it right:
        He’d created this world, then given it up, cast

His lot elsewhere, out there past
    the moons of Pluto, sick as He was
        of our whining & scribbling & warring—

though admit it, didn’t He sometimes miss
    the water hyacinth floating swiftly along
        the Mekong after the rains, the ineffable

downward curve of the weeping willows,
    the intoxicating scent of jasmine at dusk,
        Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Major,

& the dinosaurs?

ROY JACOBSTEIN was a finalist for The Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Prize with his latest book, Ripe, which won the Felix Pollak Prize. His next three books of poetry, A Form of Optimism, If They Don’t Have Ritalin in Heaven, and Fuchsia in Cambodia are seeking homes. Working as a public health physician internationally on women’s reproductive health, he divides his time between Chapel Hill, Addis Ababa, Phnom Penh, New York, and Lilongwe, hence his need for Ritalin on Earth.

“If They Don’t Have Ritalin in Heaven” appears in our Autumn 2005 issue.

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