Sweet Things and Sad Stories
I am addicted to sweet things and sad stories blurry pages and lemon chiffon artificially flavored tasting like conspiracy and summer and conversation in her upstairs garden tendrils of plants and dark luminous oil paintings --Eve strangled by the tree of knowledge Faery queens with porcelain faces wizened fingers grabbing from behind the frames the taste of lemon meringue pie ice cream in her humid kitchen as artificially flavored as these cookies that so sensually flake and melt on my tongue as I'm reading Alice Hoffman and thinking of a boy and the woods and a green place where I am dreaming running with the taste of spring candy on my lips rain and innocence in a boy's dark curls and oil-painted memories when I should be like Ruth I should turn their faces to the walls I saw her the other night she was wearing a long bright colored blazer with magenta roses she was smiling and praising her new medication and I was happy for her but I missed those livid colors those dark conversations the confessional autobiography she wrote for her children so they could know her life before they were born with our heads bent over teacups and ice cream one dark and one white she would read of women’s severed torsos in a bowl of lima beans while I shared scribblings of boys in the woods my sad youth with her wry humor- how am I here to share her genius, she could have been one of the Beats though she would mock me if I mentioned Taoism and balance she would mock me and keep me honest “Mary Oliver is a millionaire and not a mystic” “All flavors are artificial” “Where do you see nature?”, she would say, in this world governed by pavement and monster machines? She would say nature is nowhere except a metaphor to sell poetry but the Big Dig, so huge and all around her, inspired her to pantheistic awe But she’s not here- just these lemon cookies from the dollar store these sad novels of new England these windows full of tea and conspiracy these words too weakly flavored to deceive either my taste buds or my dreams