In California You Chew the Juice out of Grapes and Spit the Skin Away, a Real Luxury, and: It's Only Vanishing Cream

In California You Chew the Juice out of Grapes and Spit the Skin Away, a Real Luxury

Autumn King's green, Summer Royal's blue-blackand barely oval, with every season we havemore than one variety bragging their gemsrow after row. Beside infinity pools, we twist them

off their stems, chew oh so slow, molars workingtheir natural sugars out. But who's harvestingThompson Seedless, Ruby Seedless, the half yearthat Red Globe hang in clusters like modern chandeliers?

A real luxury to ignore the question, to justswallow them without contemplation. Miraculoushow shears rise by themselves, snip down the berries,miraculous their flight to crates, the trucks that ferry

the grapes without drivers. Seriously, who are they?Don't ask. Into a white napkin we spit the skin away.

It's Only Vanishing Cream

for Aaron Glatt

In his yard, in house slippers, my father-in-law

swings on a glider bench.It has an awning. It lays a shadow that goesup and down his torso.

Or it's the June sunlightadjusting a gold blanket on his body.

It depends on how you look at it.It depends on how youlook at this world.

There's a sizable bruise on his armwhere the nurse couldn't, justcouldn't find his vein.Midnight dark, haloed in maroon.

Listen: Twice he evaded death. Or twiceit evaded him.

It depends. And what connotationsa word holds. How death could lowera mind's temperature, dim its glow.

Let us call it vanishing cream instead.

Twice, in twoseparate seasons, a jar of vanishing creamappeared in his hospital room.Some invisible hand about to

unscrew the airtight lid. It wavered, second-guessing, unsureif now was a good time.

Now, June sunlight cranks the contraston the awning's blue fabric,

razzle-dazzles his entire yard,the pastel blooms in the flower bed wherea hummingbird flits

across the length of it, her long, long beakgleaming like a needle.