For a long time I have wanted to create a space to put up poems that are significant to me, many of which have been written by unknown writers or which lie outside the canonized bodies of work of more famous writers. Many of the poems I am drawn to are wildly discursive, and that usually means long, but I have also been meaning to prod myself to develop a larger mental data base of poems, and shorter poems seem more ammenable to memorization by heart.

So this will be a sort of mish-mash: memory poems, forgotten poems, never even remembered poems, unanthologized poems

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Returning home

The dictionary says the word nostalgia is rooted in the Greek for homesickness, and though often it has taken on a negative pallor I marvel at poems that take me back.
Like this one by Thomas Lux, which I found while re-reading the story "Winky" by George Saunders, which appeared in The New Yorker. Lux's poem appeared in the middle of it.

Refrigerator, 1957


More like a vault -- you pull the handle out
and on the shelves: not a lot,
and what there is (a boiled potato
in a bag, a chicken carcass
under foil) looking dispirited,
drained, mugged. This is not
a place to go in hope or hunger.
But, just to the right of the middle
of the middle door shelf, on fire, a lit-from-within red,
heart red, sexual red, wet neon red,
shining red in their liquid, exotic,
aloof, slumming
in such company: a jar
of maraschino cherries. Three-quarters
full, fiery globes, like strippers
at a church social. Maraschino cherries, maraschino,
the only foreign word I knew. Not once
did I see these cherries employed: not
in a drink, nor on top
of a glob of ice cream,
or just pop one in your mouth. Not once.
The same jar there through an entire
childhood of dull dinners -- bald meat,
pocked peas and, see above,
boiled potatoes. Maybe
they came over from the old country,
family heirlooms, or were status symbols
bought with a piece of the first paycheck
from a sweatshop,
which beat the pig farm in Bohemia,
handed down from my grandparents
to my parents
to be someday mine,
then my child's?
They were beautiful
and, if I never ate one,
it was because I knew it might be missed
or because I knew it would not be replaced
and because you do not eat
that which rips your heart with joy.


The thing is, the Perillos had that same jar of cherries.

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