On a Scale of, and: Wedding Cookies
Rent from DeepDyve- On a Scale of, and: Wedding Cookies
On a Scale of
You whistle to the parrot in the florist's shopand he whistles back and you keep up this shrillconversation of whistles past the B of Aand onto Castro Street where it fades into trafficthough I think he must be whistling stillover the loopy orchids, white and purple,hanging their heads in the window, soloor in clusters, almost animal themselves,like the internal organs of some faery beast—this being your kind of beauty, your nose'sasymmetry, your past full of wailing [End Page 129]
and whistling, the writhing of a damagedliver, the music box of a broken septum.And if you lope in the other directionevery beggar on the street reaches outfor you and not only for your money,calling you "Man" as if it's the most intimatename for you and you alone.You live one story over their headsand should the earth heave you backonto the street again you'd knowjust how to stick out your hand.On a scale spanning Wilbur and Bukowskiyou're so close to Bukowski you cansmell his booze breath six feet underwhile I've been dilly-dallying with meterand nurturing a secret ambitionto be a lady who lunches in Connecticut,speaking French as Madame Goottaught us in her nasal Ukrainian voice,peering over crescents of reading glassesas you do sometimes, searching 9/11conspiracy theories on the Internet.Madame would not have approved of you.We first and second generations were stumblinginto Culture while our fathers drove buses,sorted mail, got maimed at the AmericanCan factory—Cyrano, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme,memorizing Verlaine ("Les sanglots longs /Des violons / De l'automne / Blessent mon coeur / D'unelonguer / Monotone").Some of us would even marrydentists. So excusez-moi if, at times,I appear shocked, shocked to be in love with you,headed, as I had been, for a different fate:suburban convent redolent of bergamot, of Lysol,with spouse, or without. Nuns and businessmenare manicured, clipped so clean, that sometimes [End Page 130]
at night in bed when I wake up to your talon scrapingmy leg or ankle, or to your brute snoring,I have to remind myself that you can whistle,and most beautifully, too.
Wedding Cookies
Don't tell me to love this world,its surfeit of sweetness: lacy pizzelles,dollops of anisette drops,ladyfingers, lady locks, nipples of Venuspiled on a wedding tray like hundredsof virgin martyrs, undone.
Cinching the bomb to her waist, the girlhas this request—to clencha sugar cube in her teethas she drains her tea to the dregs.
I once had a cache of silver dollarsspent as soon as my mother handedmy dowry over. What was thereto save for? I planned to die young.
So I get this girl, her rush to oblivion.
Weddings, funerals, and all the birthsin between, old women cooing,blood on the sheets like raspberry jamdrying to chocolate, ginger menmade limbless, torsos snapped in two. [End Page 131]
Then, there are those Jordan almondsfavored at weddings: bittersweet,slick white bullets wrapped in gauzeto put under your pillow. And dreamof something new, some other world. [End Page 132]
Susan Gubernat's first book of poems, Flesh, won the Marianne Moore Prize and was published by Helicon Nine Press. Her poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Cortland Review, Michigan Quarterly, and others. She is an associate professor at California State University, East Bay, where she and her students have launched a new national literary magazine, Arroyo Literary Review.
