In Lynn’s Kitchen
A special night, Lynn declares. Making soup.
Not any soup, but Cream of Celery. Sure
To warm you. Thick and steamy, food to cure
The blues. With sherry, spicy. Just one swoop
And wow!, your spirit rises, not to droop
For hours. Lynn titters. Are her thoughts impure?
Randy, like mine? Perhaps if she endures
My dicing the celery….The word for me is whoops!
With tools. My blade veers. I bear down, saw back
And forth. What I produce are globs, not crescents.
The knife should glide, Lynn breathes. Pretend you lack
Brute force. She smiles, guiding my hand. I sense
The stalk parting. Roux simmers. Never hack,
Lynn whispers. I relax. And we commence.
.
Out Of Sight
O glaucoma, my youthful eyes never noticed you.
Life was a leisurely cruise along picturesque
canals through dream cities. I jotted poems
about Devon villages, Maypole dancers,
Delft vases, lissome women strolling
lidos in Lisbon. Then, my blessed
illness, you began to nibble my rods
and cones. Where blue moons had shown,
bowls of mush appeared. Fountains sputtered.
When you increased my ocular pressures, mottled
the angles, clogged the drainage, my cruel angel,
you replaced pastorals with snipers, stalkers,
marauders, vigilantes. Streets wrinkled.
Against your tapestry of gray, white
phosphorus flashed, fizzled to char.
O plundering demon, as you gnawed
my visual field, promenades cracked and
crumbled. Flags and banners fluttered, then paled
or blurred. Characters in my poems thrust pointed elbows.
Lovers squabbled. Infants squalled. Children snarled. Editors
praised my work. Now, voracious ogre, you’ve swallowed
my aqueous humor, gobbled my optic nerve, left me
blind. No more the widows, human traffickers,
island hideaways, grime, to inspire my lines.
My cloak of darkness becomes me.
© Richard Merelman
Richard Merelman is a Professor of Political Science, (Emeritus) University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has published four volumes of poetry, of which the most recent, A Door Opens (Fireweed, 2020), received an Outstanding Achievement Award in 2021 from the Wisconsin Library Association. Poems of his have appeared in Measure, Lake Effect, Stoneboat, and Inscape, among others. Recent poems are in Raven, Main Street Rag, and The Road Not Taken. Forthcoming is a poem in THINK.
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