Poems from World as Dictionary

Three poems from World as Dictionary

Ham and the Moon

Sit down
and I’ll feed you.
Ladle up a bowl of lentil soup,
a little ocean
full of sun and warmth.
Add a salad made of peppers
hot as fallen stars,
avocados, olives,
just a touch of lemon juice
and garlic.

I am not a world class cook
but for you, my friend,
I’ll stay up all night
sweating in my kitchen
to bring the cuisine
of eleven nations
to your plate by morning.
You are sick
and you will die,
the doctors say,
but I refuse to let it be
from starvation.

So here, straight from the South,
green beans cooked all day
and my finest crabcakes,
each fork, each taste
a reason to keep living.
For dessert, cherries
so ripe they whisper
carpe diem
or would if cherries
knew much Latin.
After such a dinner,
we can wipe our mouths
clean of crumbs
and of regret.

Because I do not kid myself.
I know the future,
that iron door,
will be there waiting
no matter what
I have baking in the oven.
But in the meantime,
there are ears of sweet corn
and a mother lode of mussels
it is clear God made
especially for steaming.
Take a seat at my table,
I’ll cook them up for you.

World As Dictionary

Book dog ball spoon

My daughter knows two dozen words,
common words,
and they are everywhere.
Up is her word for motion
up is up and down the stairs
up with her arms raised
is carry me, Momma.
And I do pick her up
make her part of me again.
From the seventh floor she sees
her father bundled pass below.
Hat, she says, coat. She’s right.
He’s hardly ever home.

Ope is her other verb,
Ope for open
doors, bottles, cans.
In the store she hands me
an apple.
I turn it in my palm, faking.
No Ope, I say, shaking my head.
She looks at me,
one eyebrow raised—
All things ope.

And at home I do open it,
cut the apple with my knife,
give my daughter
the white true heart of it.
Her father isn’t home yet,
hasn’t called.
Ope ope ope, I say,
we live in hope.
My daughter claps her hands.

Grief In Paris

Imagine a guillotine
in a cellar near old Les Halles
where onions are chopped
for all the onion soup in France.
A ferocious iron machine
hung with weights and counterweights,
sharp blade winking
as it slices through the onions,
falling with a whoosh,
a thud. Patented,
unique, it can chop a hundred pounds
of onions in a morning—
if the person using it is quick
and careful.

Imagine too, that man, the one
working the onion guillotine.
He is wearing goggles
tied by leather straps,
holds a slice of bread
between his teeth and breathes
through it, a filter
for the caustic air.
But still, onions
are what he is chopping,
and he can’t escape that.
He is crying. His eyes swimming
awkwardly behind the lenses
of his goggles, green turtles
drowning in the open sea.

Imagine there’s a list
kept, say, at the Prefecture of Police
where each morning the people
of Paris line up for a chance
to work the guillotine.
Not because they’re crazy about onions
or after the poor man’s job,
but because they want to cry
for hours, all day,
as they have never cried before.

Cry for lost mothers,
fathers, lovers, children.
For those six million
dead Parisians
who decorate the Catacombs,
maybe even for those deported
in 1944 whose bones
as well as lives
are lost to Paris

Now imagine that all this crying
changes nothing.
And they know it,
but are content to cry,
until their mouths are dry as sand,
until they feel emptied,
begin to giggle,
and leave the cellar as light
as holiday balloons.

Is this what you want?
So much crying,
over just a little death,
a small and private grief.
Pack it in a suitcase,
your mother would have said,
and put it in the attic.
Your life, that fast train
to the future,
is leaving from this track
at five o’clock.