The Art of Instinct

Although everything always has everything to do with sex,

each time, this one thing

has more to do with the sway of tree shadows

contained in rectangle boxes of light—

reflections of the windows, yielding from the windows,

caught in a breeze on the white plaster walls of the room,

and although it is often true the male of a species

has the more colorful markings, here I am the brightest one

against the white sheets

back arching,

a rising whale throwing its form from the sea

turning rose, then scarlet, then peony—light spreading across our flesh

and the marvelous ability to be held by instinct.

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Elizabeth Jacobson’s second book,Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, won the New Measure Poetry Prize, selected by Marianne Boruch (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2019). She is the founding director of the WingSpan Poetry Project, a not-for-profit which conducts weekly poetry classes in battered family and homeless shelters in New Mexico. Wingspan has received 4 grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Orion Magazine, Ploughshares, Plume, and others. Elizabeth is the Reviews Editor for Terrain.org and the Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico.