At the MoMA

Behind the glass they stood
shining.
An old typewriter, a metal eyelet, turned bolt,
A giant and sculptured bearing;
monuments to engineered art.
Those artifacts intrigue,
and pull my eyes from the walls
covered in paintings
of endless horizons.
My wife, who notices,
says I love the machine.
That metal eyelet lets me tie my boot,
that bearing holds the propeller,
that bolt holds the shaking tiller.
I need that boot
to grab the brown and white crags,
the propeller to sail the blue sky,
the tiller to fight the tack
across space to the endless horizon;
and the typewriter,
to do the same
for time.

by Robert Lloyd Jaffe

A Trip to the Space Station

From the stillness
on the pad,
to the screaming
and whirlwind rush
to orbit,
those very few minutes
I remember so clearly.
Floating where my eyes
see spectacular silence,
while I hear
my breathing
through the sounds
of the pumps and scrubbers;
to this day, a sound or smell
gets me right back there.
And how small
the problems of Earth
look,
passing safely over giant storms
in moments;
yes, I do remember.
But the feeling that walks with me
every day since,
is not the power,
the beauty,
or technology’s elegant grace;
it was that warm
and pulsing rush,
to find behind the hatch
a human face.

by Robert Lloyd Jaffe

Air

This morning the air
felt so light,
it was hard to imagine
it colored the sky blue.
This morning the air
felt so light,
it was surprising how hard
it pushed my hand back
as I stuck it
out the car window.
How could this be the stuff
that makes mornings like this,
and colors, and pushes hands,
and lifts airplanes
to far-off lands?

by Robert Lloyd Jaffe

Alluvium

I keep finding the best books
Lying on the floor and end-tables
Around the neatly organized shelves
Of the library and bookstore.

Someone has grabbed each one
Looked with a pensive blank stare
And dropped it–not where they found it–
But in front of me, to pick up
After them.

There is something sacred
About leafing through another’s garbage;
Now that I think of it
My most cherished finds
In an ancient brook
Have been picked from the piles of stones
That others have sifted through
And blindly looked past
Those million-year-old rocks
Missing the delicate ammonite
Hiding in the open.

There is great value
In having a blind man
Do your digging for you.

by Robert Lloyd Jaffe

Asking

To ask the sea
to make sweet water
it has to go to places
it never thought it could go
until, far into the mountain valleys,
it has no more right
to call itself the sea.

by Robert Lloyd Jaffe