I love Gertrude Stein, not because she was a lesbian and an expatriate, although lesbians and expatriates rank high on my admiration list. I love Gertrude Stein because she was imaginative, inventive; she challenges. She challenges and far surpasses any boundary of what is (or was) considered “mainstream.” Tender Buttons is to me, to this day, an inspiring work of literary art. Both of these poems were born of Tender Buttons, and one even borrows from it.
Servings
…and it is wet wet weather wet weather wet.
Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
Asparagus in a lean in a lean to hot
and the steam rises; sequent
torsos stretch to the light
pull of the dusty stove fan.
Its heat and red-hot rim,
an exposed eye, hold me.
Those bodies weeping, bleed
kelly green, harmonic
bend of tired spines press
against the steel pot, stainless.
This makes it art, found
in a life so grown from dirt.
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Dreaming of Gertrude Before Morning Comes
Short days and nights shorter still and
still is night when I no longer write the cycle
begins again and again again and then I wake just
wanting to take a lover and no belongings but this longing to run away.
I like it, a little rhyme...
ReplyDeleteVery lovely. I like the unexpected nature of the "kelly green" following "bleed." You might expect "red," or the crimson of blood, and get instead the green of the plant--gorgeous. I like, too, that you've taken such an unlikely subject--asparagus--and made it so beautiful. It's a photograph in words, which is what a poem should be.
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