(Writing wretched verse so you don’t have to since 1995)
The Fruit Standkeeper, Wroclaw
His hands are a thing of beauty,
long, thick fingers moving in webs
grazing apples and onions
settling each into the rusted cradle
of his scale, the needle’s soft bounce
It is as if God composed these hands, or Mozart
They are not made for numbers
and trip crudely on the abstract
Thin hair drapes his forehead, bowed
and crowded with thoughts of inventory
ears red as ripe peppers from raw wind
eyes of brownish tint flick from paper
to patron, from change bin to basket where
his wares lie still for inspection
marked by steadiness, survival
Each fruit and vegetable ripped from the garden
where they once grew, stems and stalks hunting for sun
and so this farmer keeps a fruitstand now
serving to his pigeony shoppers
flesh wrapped in fiber, juices in color
seeds hoping to live another day
Ah, the portraiture of the make-believe poet! Is there nothing this brilliant young man doesn’t notice? No brow he cannot crowd with thought, no finger he cannot web, no shopper he cannot, uh, pigeon? Is there, in short, no life too small for his princely consideration?
I excreted this one during my summer in Poland. I’d gone over there to pursue a doomed love affair, which is how I knew I was a poet. That and the body odor.
Poland, it turned out, was densely populated with figures of the sort one needed paint if one was to affirm one’s calling. Working people. Quiet. Noble. Hardbitten. You know: folks!
Years later, living alone in Somerville, vibrating with the appropriate woe, I would fall under the spell of Thomas Lux, another chronic noticer of the small and mundane. “Refrigerator, 1957.” I must have read that poem 600 times a day. And “The Man Inside the Chipmunk Suit.” I could recite that one, both in the Greek and the Latin.
I knew there was something different and better about these poems, but I chalked it up to the poverty of my imagination. It never occurred to me that my heart was at issue. I should have listened to the woman I left behind in Poland – she knew the score. But many of us spend our twenties belting out arias of self-concern. We gawk at the world through the wet lens of narcissism. It’s sort of our job.
I’m making excuses, of course. But there’s a gentler way to put all this, one that probably involves seeds. And fiber.
Now that that’s settled, let’s move on to a guest poem. This one was submitted by Ms. Sarah Sweeney of Pawtucket, RI, and Ms. Kerri French of Woonsocket, NH, both of whom are simply spectacular and also medically unemployable.
Poem Composed on the Back of an Applebee’s Receipt
You hand me my apple
pie and say “Sweets for
the sweet” and I
know that you are
wrong: night after
night on the job and
just a poem for a tip,
making your rounds
with water in aprons of
silk and soot and
other sharp things,
and what is this—
this thing we have?
“Is it more than
chicken finger love,”
you ask yourself
as plates crash beneath
you, tears filling
your Applebee heart.
God, I love you people.
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