Meanwhile an engine revved, the neighbors yelled, rap music played, a horn honked, and the taco truck passed by.

I drove down to visit my grandmother on Saturday.  Say what you will about the suburbs, but the thing that immediately strikes me when I go there is the quietness of the neighborhood.  Her backyard feels like an oasis.  Actually, it reminds me of the secret garden.  Not that it's not well-maintained, but that it's stuck in a time long past.

My grandfather loved fountains and he put two of them in the backyard way back in the '70s.  One is a lion's head on the far back wall that used to spout water into a ceramic pool.  The other is much larger and looks to me like a chess piece.  The bottom part where the water used to flow is surrounded by a short wall.  When I was little and we would come out to visit my grandparents, I liked to play by that fountain and pretend that the wall was the gazebo in The Sound of Music.  I would skip around on it singing "You Are Sixteen Going on Seventeen."  Sixteen seemed to be a magical age, full of possibility.

This past visit, I was in the backyard looking at those fountains sitting thirsty.  They are surrounded by enormous lemon and orange trees that are currently bursting with fruit.  Those trees, as old as the fountains, made for a nice paradox.

While I can still recall the sound of water spilling through the fountains-- a calm yet lively sound-- these days I can also appreciate the silence.

Shark's Teeth

Everything contains some
silence.  Noise gets
its zest from the
small shark's-tooth
shaped fragments
of rest angled
in it.  An hour
of city holds maybe
a minute of these
remnants of a time
when silence reigned,
compact and dangerous
as a shark.  Sometimes
a bit of a tail
or fin can still
be sensed in parks.

-Kay Ryan

Why I love grocery shopping

Ever heard of the idea of eternal return?  It has been referenced in countless works in pop culture.  It's in The Matrix, Groundhog Day, and The Never Ending Story.  It's in the first line of Peter Pan and a major theme of the excellent TV show Battlestar Galactica.  It is the idea of cyclical patterns in the universe.  "All of this has happened before and all this will happen again."  Sounds very dramatic.  And poetic.

In a similar way, it's like saying that history repeats itself.  And in yet another way, it's like reading something from a long time ago and being surprised to learn that we can identify with it.  I remember being shocked in reading The Canterbury Tales.  Some of those characters could have made themselves at home at any trailer park.  Because the way human beings behave now is not so different from the way they behaved hundreds or thousands of years ago.  We are still innately selfish, we still make war, and we still do stupid things in the name of love. 

So when I was reading this poem by Allen Ginsberg, his feelings about the world he was living in are not so different from the way people view the world today.

A Supermarket in California

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked
down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking
at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon
fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at
night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!
--and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking
among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?
What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you,
and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy
tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the
cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour.
Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and
feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade
to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automo-
biles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America
did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a
smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of
Lethe?

--Berkeley, 1955

To understand this poem, you have to understand that Ginsberg liked to invoke Whitman when he was writing.  Whitman was almost like his muse, and Whitman's poems were usually of an observational nature.  He connected to things, people, nature, which is what he's doing in the supermarket in this poem.  He's interacting with the products, with the grocery clerks, while Ginsberg watches from a distance.  Ginsberg feels disconnected from all these things going on around him and all the people.  He can only connect with poets who have long since died (García Lorca was a Spanish poet who was murdered in the Spanish Civil War).  At the end of this poem, Ginsberg longs for the past and these poets' idealized versions of it that they wrote about.  In the supermarket, where he is "shopping for images" (Oh, Allen, I've been there),  he is bombarded by the busyness, all the choices of "neon fruit," and "brilliant stacks of cans," but he can't find what he wants.  He feels lonely and separate from the modern world.

Upon reading this, it made me think about how accurately that still portrays America today.  We are often listening to our iPods or on our cell phones when we are shopping.  We do this when we drive or ride the subway.  We avoid connecting with the people around us, whether it's out of fear or selfishness.  Sometimes if we're caught sitting at a table with a group of people all on their blackberries, we stop and reflect on this and someone will say that they yearn for a simpler time.  What simpler time was that?

Cannibals and pineapples

Because it is Monday, and I think we all need a bit of a pick-me-up, I'm going to share my second favorite joke with you.  It goes like this:

There were three men who were lost in the jungle.  They were captured by cannibals.  The cannibal king told the prisoners that they could live if they pass a test.  The first part of the test was to go into the jungle and get ten pieces of the same kind of fruit. So all three men went their separate ways to gather fruits.

The first one came back and said to the king, "I brought ten apples."

The king then explains the rest of the test to him: you have to shove all ten fruits up your butt without any expression on your face or you'll be eaten.

The first apple went in...but on the second one he winced in pain, so he was killed and went to heaven.

The second guy arrives with ten berries. When the king explained the test to him, he thought to himself that this should be easy. 1...2...3...4...5...6...7...8...but on the ninth berry he burst out laughing and therefore also was killed.

The first guy and the second guy met up in heaven.  The first one said, "You almost made it.  Why did you laugh?"

The second one replied, "I couldn't help it.   I saw the third guy walking up with ten pineapples."

It's silly, but I can't help but giggle every time I read it.  Two things made me think of that joke.  One was that my roommate challenged me to write about pineapples, and the other was that I found an old email (yes, my favorite past time) with this poem attached:

Fork

by Charles Simic 

This strange thing must have crept
Right out of hell.
It resembles a bird’s foot
Worn around the cannibal’s neck.

As you hold it in your hand,
As you stab with it into a piece of meat,
It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:
Its head which like your fist
Is large, bald, beakless and blind.


In the email, my friend said he thought of me as soon as he read it but that he wasn't sure what that said about me or him for that matter.  I think it says that I love a good cannibal joke. 

And in case you were wondering, my number one favorite joke goes, What did the fish say to the concrete wall? 


"Dam."

Roid-mato

Look at the size of this tomato!

I got it yesterday at the CSA (there's your assonance).  Whatever farm that supplies them is supposedly organic, but this is a juicehead gorilla tomato if I've ever seen one. To give you some perspective of scale, here it is beside your normal Trader Joe's variety:

I actually think it's closer in size to this watermelon:

This called for a line-up reminiscent of the scale of planets in our solar system:

And then I got carried away:

I included Pluto as a planet even though I know it's been downgraded because the strawberry was so cute next to the tomato.  And isn't the plum Earth pretty?  Hey, look at all that consonance.  Consonance and assonance in one post?  That's a lot for a Friday.  Therefore, no rhyming for you.  Much like the planets revolve around the sun, many things in my life revolve around food and bugs, and with this ham-fisted segue, I leave you with this old poem I wrote:

A Morning Miracle

I happened to see Jesus one day in a line of ants.
Around my bathroom sink
they walked the curved
and narrow, careful
to avoid the temptation
of going for a swim for a bit
of sticky toothpaste.
It wouldn't fit God's will to get
out of order for pure greed,
and gluttony is a deadly sin.
So they plodded across
the great white virginal countertop,
I suspect on their way to turn a cracker crumb
into loaves of bread for thousands.