Tag: Boyhood

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Attar

Big trees grew smaller, small ones big.
I could reach the third crotch of the willow,
tiptoe to catalpa pods once shinnied up after.
A fig surreptitiously picked smacked of
delights so simple they had passed me by,
mulberries mixed with tar from telephone
poles tasting of wine from Provence.
With gentle, bruising brushes, as one might
caress a clitoris, I turned gardenia
brown, its honeysuckle taint redolent
of the boy I no longer was. Amnesia
may be tractable to olphactory cure.
Without our cicerone smell
it’s blind lead deaf; deaf, the blind.

***
This thought I had the other day. The more I thought it, the more it took the form of a mute sonnet. < Pastis

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Eggs

Mother taught me to fry an egg when I was fifteen.
She was a terrible cook. She considered all forms
of housework domestic burdens cast upon her by
Society, whose rules and customs she did not respect.
A working mother of four, she bore the brunt of the rise
of our war-honed agri-business, its flatulent hype,
standardization, shrink-wrap packaging, early stages
of the nefarious fast-food industry whose calculated
super-sizing perpetrates on humans what some
object to on ducks and geese for the sake of foie gras.
Yet she was right about eggs. And this egg lesson was
the first of three ordained once she saw the incipient effects
of pubescence on me. The second, to sew a button.
The third carries me to this moment: ten-finger typing.
“This way,” she opined, “when you end up with a woman, won’t
be because you need her for anything other than herself”.
The worldly reader will have noticed: Mother omitted
another want which enslaves many men to women.
Nothing, she knew, she could teach me to help that.