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Amidst old smoke and stale perfume of a broken night, a seraphic voice posed a question in the dark— to tremble to hear a moan to sink into unguent warmth in a sacred retreat. In the green room, yellow gloves lay on a coffee table. She lit a cigarette and gazed at the fine rain I took her scent and felt her breath her nostrils flared an arabesque veil of smoke drifted into cloudy gray-green eyes. “Have we spoken?” A hot blush came to my cheek. “Your blood is warm.” “I read Bishop Sheen.” She forced a laugh and blew a jet  from under dark lashes. “I adore Coblenz. Kiss me. ”   She tasted of tobacco and stale mint. I slid fingers to her nipples her bosom swelled a tremor crossed her face. “Would you like a trip to Greece?” That’s where I want to go: White-velvet breasts C-section painted nails, on a cold-hard floor. I woke to a curving figure  in a wide-brimmed hat staring in a mirror, black-spike heels, cigarette, eye-liner, headlights in the drive shouts at the front door.

Pythia arose from The Education of a Young Gentleman , a nonfiction short story which tells of the late-night encounter between a 19-year-old boy and a 29-year-old married woman in a highly charged sexual atmosphere. She is fixed and unattainable at the conclusion of the poem, like the characters on Keats Grecian urn. I used Pythia to say something I wanted to say about the strange magic of the woman and the encounter.  My style tends to be sardonic. My words are on the definite side, they don't caress each other. My first sense of literature was from the 19 th century writers. My introduction into culture and politics was high school Latin.  Pythia owes much to Catullus and Lesbia,  Thackeray and Vanity Fair, Eliot and Prufrock.  Why poetry? A poem is an attempt to take the human, the historical, and the finite to the realm of the universal and infinite, which, on the face of it, is impossible using the materials of this world. Yet I try to distill feeling, emotion, what it

WHY I LIKE IT: Poetry editor Hezekiah writes… Pythia is a short, epic, poetic quest for two, not to be missed. Charles Jacobson is promethean in this intimate, imagistic, incidental encounter-conquest. Who’s the muse who writes his stuff?—I goda get in touch. “…to sink into unguent warmth” “ I took her scent and felt her breath.” And maybe the best line, “An arabesque veil of smoke drifted into cloudy gray-green eyes.” I was riveted by his words and the amplitude of the scene as it transcends to the divine and lapses back to the banal.(Spacing and font size are poet’s own) HS Senior editor Charles writes: What you are about to read is consummate poetry by a consummate literary artist. Just as mesmerizing as ‘Pythia’ are the author’s extensive notes and footnotes. Once settled on the page,, he is both sculptor and archeologist. Exquisite word choice and rarefied technique put this poem in a class by itself. Five stars.   Pythia owe