Eating in Silence
Anger is a pulse whose clattering
is inside the glass heart and the grey cathedral.
Slice the peach through the plush mantle
into the wiry devil’s den. It is her splendor.
The woman next to me won’t sleep with me
and the woman I want is in Romania.
The Danube’s blue architecture haunts
the bears’ dreams; they dream of blueberries.
Do not resist the rage; instead, face into
its burled finials and artichoke fringes.
Food rests through the taste buds,
where it wakes to the thunder of collapsed ideas.
Hunger, that unwanted weather, soaks
the outer fabric but leaves the skin dry as a pelt.
I reach into the fog to touch your shoulder—
the blade and its rose whispers cut the air.
The riddle does not exist…
See the solution in the vanishing of the problem.
Crusty bread, the consonant between vowels
of butter, coaxed among cloud cover of a spring day.
No one can guess the time from the raisin-colored light.
He drones like hot magic. She is cradled by night root ground.
Tongue against reed, dear constancy, tongue against tongue.
Romania is a distant place, powdered with snow and the lost name.
Each month a contemporary poet presents three poems and one personal essay in which food is consumed, passed over, or reckoned with. Sean is our poet for May, 2014.
Sean Singer was born in Mexico in 1974. His first book Discography won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. His second book, Honey & Smoke, is forthcoming from Eyewear Publishing in 2015.
Comments are closed.