How It Tastes
How’s that tasting for you? She crooned
in flight like that woman with an alligator purse
in a schoolgirl’s jump rope chant
might goo-goo a baby chortling in its crib,
swooping on by his table in mid-chirp
to leave him muttering fine, just fine
to her bouncing pony tail. Every one
of the million wrinkles in the jostling bay
cupped silver glares that winked so sharply
they smarted eyes that his hands, slick
with hamburger slop, could not rub.
And where was his paper napkin?--
gusted against a chair leg across the deck.
He was a diner with needs. Interrupting
his disquisition that history gets changed
not by heroes but by a swollen spirit
moving the masses who but create heroes
that match their moods, she’d sailed
over the meal like a seagull will coast over
a crab cake to count coup on it
with practice dives before its daring snatch.
And so chatter he’d interrupted resumed:
whether loons are ducks, because someone
had mistook a cormorant for one.
A perfect day on the harbor, so who cares
if she never refilled the water glasses?
Jittery sparrows were begging at his feet,
so the diner rolled mushy bun bread into pellets
betwixt thumb and forefinger and lobbed
them at their little heads.
in flight like that woman with an alligator purse
in a schoolgirl’s jump rope chant
might goo-goo a baby chortling in its crib,
swooping on by his table in mid-chirp
to leave him muttering fine, just fine
to her bouncing pony tail. Every one
of the million wrinkles in the jostling bay
cupped silver glares that winked so sharply
they smarted eyes that his hands, slick
with hamburger slop, could not rub.
And where was his paper napkin?--
gusted against a chair leg across the deck.
He was a diner with needs. Interrupting
his disquisition that history gets changed
not by heroes but by a swollen spirit
moving the masses who but create heroes
that match their moods, she’d sailed
over the meal like a seagull will coast over
a crab cake to count coup on it
with practice dives before its daring snatch.
And so chatter he’d interrupted resumed:
whether loons are ducks, because someone
had mistook a cormorant for one.
A perfect day on the harbor, so who cares
if she never refilled the water glasses?
Jittery sparrows were begging at his feet,
so the diner rolled mushy bun bread into pellets
betwixt thumb and forefinger and lobbed
them at their little heads.
