Jacob Sheetz-Willard

Curriculum Vitae

Hard to see anything but there’s a whirring sound,
a series of clicks. Then boom: existence! What a drag,

what a cosmic bummer to be born—given all the potential
arrangements of space-time—into History with its death-

and-taxes-type ethos of linearity and well-groomed
horizons. Damn the bad luck of our not being God

writes Pessoa under one of his invented names...
Imagine it: everything still plausible, the dark un-

differentiated, the days not yet numbered. Something
like a lukewarm salt bath in a missile silo with the lights

turned off. I could have been a windstorm or the laws
of gravity. I could have been a blade of grass, a black hole,

a system of intersecting wheels set with eyeballs
as numerous as the northern stars. Oh envy, bitter cog

of my reality, best loved of my mistakes... at least the view’s
not bad: outside the window men in beige uniforms take

core samples from middling pine trees in the lot by the forest
preserve. Driving screws into trunk after trunk as if searching

for the sources of self-regard. You can hear birds, too,
downy woodpeckers tapping out codes in the tall branches,

the spots on their small black wings the map of a night sky
even our most impressive instruments have yet to locate.

Jacob Sheetz-Williard is a poet from Leadville, Colorado, and an MFA graduate of the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. His work has appeared in New South, Kestrel, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere.