Pearl Brilmyer
Years ago, it was
a pit of hissing chemicals—
the very one they almost
fell into in cartoons. Since, it's been sealed
off, shaken up, left to drip dry
and severed open after a
million sleepy years.
I like how she's bee
describing it, I mean, what it
is she's been saying, more or less,
though all around me, turned like a sea of
scales in her direction, most of
our pack pay attention solely
with their faces; I'd
say, without a real
ear to our shaman—that is, all
but for Paola, ten, laboring to relate,
however haltingly, how it
is stalactites are formed and how
we're not supposed to touch them—to
me, some one who says
brindisi only
when they mean the place, and never for
the clinking of glasses, a shy
straniero dumped in a pit of talkers,
explainers, one strangely content
to be drowned in them, stuffed with their
fish, and teased in toasts;
but I stop her, tell
her, it's ok, she can stop
interpreting. Instead, she looks
to her father, harshly whispers, Basta,
Papa, basta! He's been spotted
fondling those forbidden, pitted
popsicles, caught but-
tering them with his
finger-tips; forty-four years old
and he can't keep his hand off their
serous folds—that aren't, no, even wet finds
his thumb. Standing back, eyes, slowly
moving up toward the ceiling, he's
thinking of Turning,
his test, the real, live
difficulty to present to pass
it; and, yet, also, how when things
are just left underground, like carrot seeds,
the conditions can be right for
growth. But we've all got things in our
heads like those on his
mind, as we descend
down toward the pit of the peach, down,
a dreadful katabasis toward
the sharp and sticky, where more things grow up,
up and away from us. Rules are that
which is new, Paola might be
thinking, Do I mind
that I am getting
old? Papa sets his belly on
the metal rail. And I'm wondering
how it is I will ever describe it—
decoración de Guadi,
beleuchten durch Kafka, a father
and a daughter pair that,
to all sing Blake's songs—
Silly, it's just rocks of rainbow
sherbert, stony flaps of bacon,
a raisin and a grape. Oh but get out,
metaphor, out of me, until
I fail to understand how brain
processes are to
c-fibers firing,
the way light is to a stream of
photons, you know, the way water
is to H2O, through analogy
pitted against analogy,
through me, just pit me with a dad
and daughter and see
her, the daughter, reign
in a land of fake fruit, playing
tea with me, the American
teddy bear. Perhaps today, I will lack
the mechanics. I'll choose not to
comprehend my tour guide, and I
will listen to her.