Sudden Clarity at the Artichoke Stands, and: Small Hours

SUDDEN CLARITY AT THE ARTICHOKE STANDS / David Barber It is the bargain season along the highway where the usual muscular sky dismisses the shape of things to come. Five for a dollar. Six for a dollar. Eighteen cents a pound. The first serious tilt toward summer, the locals would tell you, begins in the earnestness of early artichoke stands: one after another blooming out of the mist, desperately generous, just before you pass. One obvious thing to say about artichokes is how sexual. All that opening, armor that tries to talk you out of it, the secret bud at the center speaking for everything forbidden. So much of it prelude. But even here where they tumble in the beds of pickups, spill over tables, stun the roadsides with their wantonness, it's no different than anywhere else: the emblems of desire resolve into the particular. I'm thinking of a checkered tablecloth, ringless hands, the slow cajoling of gas heat and a kitchen window hitched six inches to keep the spices honest. Scarves of steam; two artichokes perspiring on my mother's china. I'm thinking of a corner table in a beachfront cafe and the fingers of a woman who did not want anything I could give her undressing an artichoke with a deliberacy that seemed almost sad. The smallness of her wrists, teethmarks on the spent clutter of petals, the last lump of its heart in my own mouth:her quick gift, her gesture. And I'm losing myself, as the scale complains tunelessly beneath my dozen, over the ingenuity it must have taken to first see cuisine in the hard aloofness of these blossoms and over the artful lengths we will go for our three seconds of shuddering. It is absurd. It is always 18 · The Missouri Review absurd, passion, until we concede to the fine details of it: Chinese soap, half-moon scar above her left nipple, hole in the armpit of her favorite dress, Pigeon Point, Coltrane, blackberries; that alarming lavender sky in the Monet postcard pinned at perfect eye-level to one who is leaning close, looking up, riding her. David Barber The Missouri Review · 19 SMALL HOURS / David Barber The dark has everything to do with memory. Memory being what the dark of our bodies abides by. What swells without warning. Afterwards, she talked and he listened. It was the year of her birth. The melons were beautiful that summer and the heat tremendous. She likes the story best about her father pulling off the road to purchase a heroic watermelon that took two arms to carry though the contractions by that time were fierce. She likes the thought of newspapers spread on the tailgate all delivery long. The Rambler parked in the shade by the hospital. Her father slicing away. She got out of bed to close the window. Her body was darker than the rest of the room. Then he talked and she listened. He likes how inside the dark of melons there is light. The way it waits there. It calls to mind how light is dark's child. It reminds him of rooms made intentionally dark where his body got lighter and lighter. If love is dark work, it is only because the body beside us can be the light we live by. He doesn't like to call it hunger. It's more luminous than that. We press our breath into service like saws. Something opens and we see. 20 · The Missouri Review ...