.
Citrus paradisi (Pink Grapefruit): photo by א (Aleph), 9 June 2010
Sunday, I am eating a
grapefruit, church is over at the Russian
Orthodox to the
west.
she is dark
of Eastern descent,
large brown eyes look up from the Bible
then down. a small red and black
Bible, and as she reads
her legs keep moving, moving,
she is doing a slow rhythmic dance
reading the Bible...
long gold earrings;
2 gold bracelets on each arm,
and it's a mini-suit, I suppose,
the cloth hugs her body,
the lightest of tans is that cloth,
she twists this way and that,
long yellow legs warm in the sun...
there is no escaping her being
there is no desire to...
my radio is playing symphonic music
that she cannot hear
but her movements coincide exactly
to the rhythms of the
symphony...
she is dark, she is dark
she is reading about God.
I am God.
grapefruit, church is over at the Russian
Orthodox to the
west.
she is dark
of Eastern descent,
large brown eyes look up from the Bible
then down. a small red and black
Bible, and as she reads
her legs keep moving, moving,
she is doing a slow rhythmic dance
reading the Bible...
long gold earrings;
2 gold bracelets on each arm,
and it's a mini-suit, I suppose,
the cloth hugs her body,
the lightest of tans is that cloth,
she twists this way and that,
long yellow legs warm in the sun...
there is no escaping her being
there is no desire to...
my radio is playing symphonic music
that she cannot hear
but her movements coincide exactly
to the rhythms of the
symphony...
she is dark, she is dark
she is reading about God.
I am God.
Odd-eyed cat: photo by Keith Kissel, 15 February 2007
Charles Bukowski: Girl In A Miniskirt Reading The Bible Outside My Window, from Mockingbird Wish Me Luck, 1972
By the by, this is not the first time we here have been, by this same hip cat, startled into life.
ReplyDeleteYa know Tom, when our own heterochromiac Max Scherzer tosses a great game, Tigers fans say, "he pitched THAT one with the blue eye." Too often this year, he's been throwing brown.
ReplyDeleteThis prophecy was spoken in the Old Testament also, in reference to The Miraculous Pitching Hand mentioned in The Book of Mordecai.
ReplyDeleteI love this one. And the cat. And all the cats I have known and owned, though the last one used to bat my eyes when I was dreaming. Taught me to remember my dreams . . .
ReplyDeleteWait a minute, did you just flip me off...twice?
ReplyDeleteBtw, anyone ask you this week if you’d read C. David Heymann’s quote from his NYT obit:
“I learned from this,” he told The New York Observer in 1999, “never write a book about a poet if you want to sell books.”
Bless you, Tom, for ignoring the obvious.
Bukowski always adds spice to the day.
ReplyDeleteTom,
ReplyDeleteIt is maybe only coincidental that i saw an odd eyed cat a week ago who regularly shows up at my grandmother's kitchen door..The turkish are fond of them...As according to them "the eyes must be as green as the lake and as blue as the sky"...
As for charles' immortalization of the fact that very little passes between the hands that clap and those who rather point a finger or two at one other or oneself might just salvage something...i agree
Manik, I think you've homed in on what's so interesting about this poem. Hands imagined as clapping in rhythm or hands imagined as clasped in prayer, eyes looking up to the sky above the Orthodox church or eyes captured by the swaying dancer reading the Bible... but a few of the many varieties of religious experience?
ReplyDeleteHazen,
Well, the soppy marketing aspects notwithstanding, something (diabolical?) hinted that Mother might not mind a shot to spice up her Day.
Possibly even a double.
Nin,
One of the cats here does that to Angelica when he wants her to wake up. Another of them expresses the same desire by yodeling. A third has the nocturnal mission of vigorously sucking on my earlobes. Weird, but certainly gets one's attention. However I expect the purpose of this curious behaviour is not to awaken, but to reawaken... memories of a mother removed too soon?
Cats dreaming, one can hear their small vocalizations. A. thinks they are dreaming about tracking down little animals.
Kent,
You know you are my main man. Even on a day when the local sandlot gang was being totally verlander'd.
(Though it required all five fingers, possibly an asterisk'd detail).
Wonderful poem. I agree with A. -- they are dreaming about tracking down little animals. One of our cats -- a cream-colored Persian named Claude -- artfully distributes papers he finds on my desk most nights in amazing patterns across the floor and sometimes up and down the stairs. During the act of creation, his vocalizations are varied, piercing and a little disturbing. When his work is completed he is silent and returns to bed. He should, as they say, be in a museum. (Or, rather, his work should.) Our dog Edie has two different colored eyes. Curtis
ReplyDeleteAccurate placement of "verlander'd" aboard my personal canon requires return trip to Fan Poems and, yes, Bill Lee did threaten he'd "Van Goghed" Larry Barnett. Then I spot:
ReplyDeleteI wake up on Mother's Day
with tears in my eyes
for my dead father
and a song in my ears
it's my daughter singing
"Take Me Out To The Ballgame"
Berkson's back cover pic: for years my vision of heaven on earth. Hear my grandson Finn now sing that song at Comerica, his sister's t-ball games, and for his mother and her mother on this day the dream alive.