Still Life
Aug 12 2002


It happened again
a phrase finds the light of day
or mulls about inside,
a startled string of words
like orphaned socks on a clothesline.
Unexpected company
the utter originality
of something you’re certain has never before been heard
in the history of the sentence,
a new permutation on the infinite possibilities contained in 26 letters.
As tonight I thought
“I must dust off that fruit,”
even my erratic standards of housekeeping offended
by this decorative white bowl
of papier mache eggplant
and ersatz red pepper
and a sad imitation of cabbage.
Which, I suppose, are vegetables anyway;
but nevertheless
I go on to ruminate
about still life.
A rudimentary exercise for any respectable painter
but which I think is the nub of poetry,
to capture a moment
and blow-off the dust of habit
and hold it up to the light.
And I think it also speaks to life,
only fully lived in present tense:
like total immersion
in unselfconscious beauty;
like the benign narcissism
of a child;
and like leaving home
in mismatched socks
too pre-occupied in thought to remember.
And like a poet’s single-minded focus
when he concentrates on dusting-off
familiar words.