Showing posts with label Poems. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Poems. Show all posts

Saturday, September 26, 2009

Wooed in the Supermarket

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Allen Ginsberg.

I hear the supermarket's a good place to get a date. In Vons this afternoon, I fell in love with a gorgeous eggplant, and just had to ask it to come back to my place. Luckily, the eggplant agreed.

I have no idea what I’ll make with it—probably parmesan—but not today. I want to admire it for a few more days, in much the same way Rosie O’Donnell once said she wanted to hire Tom Cruise to do work around her house, just for the show.

Summer fruit looks to be all done for this season. The trays that had held lofty pyramids of white nectarines and massive peaches the last few months have been replaced with apples. Don’t get me wrong, I love apples—I really do—but it was mid-eighties today. Those apples must’ve been flown in from below the equator. Summer can’t be over yet, can it? Bryan and I haven’t grilled enough dinners. We need more Saturdays in the backyard with Time magazine and glasses of cranberry juice. I want to take Louie on more nighttime walks, and feel the just-cooling air on my skin. In college, a roommate and I used to run through the campus sprinklers behind our apartment on late nights that were still nearly eighty degrees. Can I do this in our complex?

But the last few mornings have been so foggy it’s almost mist. It clears, but soon it will be clearing later and later in the morning. By the time May gray comes around—with the next summer hiding behind a tight corner—I will be thirty-one. Is that too old to run through sprinklers? What peaches and what penumbras!

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Memorization

Jamaica Kincaid was a bit late to this afternoon's Q&A. So to pass the time, poet Henri Cole asked audience members to stand up and recite any poems we had memorized. I was surprised and saddened to realize I didn't know any. The best I can do is the opening lines to A Prayer for Owen Meany...

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.

It gets better from there, but I can't remember anymore. It's a great beginning, but I should know a poem, dammit! (And maybe a little more from Owen Meany's first paragraph.) So this is the task I'm set for myself, to memorize a really great poem. And then who knows? Maybe I'll want to memorize another. Another? For starters, I'm thinking maybe something by Carl Sandberg or Emerson.

I challenge others to do the same. Come on, at least it's not the multiplication table.