Poetry Selections
Page 1
Making love we assume
may be defined by the equation
for the hyperbola y = 1/x...
From
—Sex
and Mathematics
|
Making love we assume |
|
Home
Poetry Titles |
|
||
|
A pasture is best, freshly mown so that by the time a grounder’s plowed through all that chewed, spit-out grass to reach you, the ball will be bruised with green kisses. Start in the evening. Come with a bad sunburn and smelling of chlorine, water still crackling in your ears. Play until the ball is khaki— a moveable piece of the twilight— the girls’ bare arms in the bleachers are pale, the heat lightning jumps in the west. Play until you can only see pop-ups and routine grounders get lost in the sweet grass for extra bases. |
|
||
We never saw the audience we served. Downstairs in those steel kitchens, in the loud bucket brigade of orders, pots, and shuttling of dishes hand-to-hand, you couldn’t hear the murmurous conversation of the rich at lunch. But you could feel them, scented, laundered, sitting on your head. You could feel it right through the floor, feel it so well that when we ran out of mashed potatoes once and Cookie skimmed some off a garbage pail, slapped it on a plate and dealt it off to Hernandez, the Head Chef, who flourished sauce on it and shipped it on, our kitchen practically spluttered to a stop— a glee we somehow managed to tie up the moment the manager strolled in. I juggled the bakery’s steel blow and pans. My buddy, Frank, tackled the garbage-can-size stew pots, wept his sweat back in them as he’d disappear head-first, wrestling them down to reach the bottom and bark the black crust. Once you’ve served below the ground like that, making the world materialize graciously above, where hunger is a problem in chamber music— once you’ve made chamber music in the kitchen, if you love chamber music, you must love it knowing what it means.
--for Jason
Through the open car window Seven needles in a haystack BoPEEP-doodle-our-PEOple! snatched by ear out of the moving prairie, like you already fading, passed, gone. BoPEEP-doodle-our-PEOple! If I could find it, it would be points of sunlight glancing off a brooch so near shades of gold in these moving grasses I could scarcely distinguish it from the grasses. Like you it is always gone.
BoPEEP-doodle-our-PEOple! The bird pulled it off like a string of catches on this flying trapeze which keeps swinging back. If birds’ songs simple mean I’m here! I’m here! then why a song so baroque? How many notes did it have? Which notes were extra?
In the Beatles’ “Blackbird” You can hear a meadowlark, its song canned as the slow-motion replay of a pass reception on TV: Love studied into pornography. BoPEEP-diddle-diddle-her-PEEP-hole! The bird falls off a see-saw, hesitates, picks itself back up on the rising board, completes its song. It does it again.
I prefer the song that eludes me, This one which we are passing, Banjo music picked out Through wind and distance Already falling behind
Gone and not gone. --for Ana
|
|||
| END of Page 1 | |||
