Bang, she's dead.

My head is a big throbbing tomato and National Poetry Month is almost over. Some poems make me yearn for MORE MORE. Some poems are so tight, good, gracious that I am good where I end up. HERE IS ONE OF THE LATTER.

Tomatoes
by Stephen Dobyns

A woman travels to Brazil for plastic
surgery and a face-lift. She is sixty
and has the usual desire to stay pretty.
Once she is healed, she takes her new face
out on the streets of Rio. A young man
with a gun wants her money. Bang, she’s dead.
The body is shipped back to New York,
but in the morgue there is a mix-up. The son
is sent for. He is told that his mother
is one of these ten different women.
Each has been shot. Such is modern life.
He studies them all but can’t find her.
With her new face, she has become a stranger.
Maybe it’s this one, maybe it’s that one.
He looks at their breasts. Which ones nursed him?
He presses their hands to his cheek.
Which ones consoled him? He even tries
climbing onto their laps to see which
feels most familiar but the coroner stops him.
Well, says the coroner, which is your mother?
They all are, says the young man, let me
take them as a package. The coroner hesitates,
then agrees. Actually, it solved a lot of problems.
The young man has the ten women shipped home,
then cremates them all together. You’ve seen
how some people have a little urn on the mantel?
This man has a huge silver garbage can.
In the spring, he drags the garbage can
out to the garden and begins working the teeth,
the ash, the bits of bone into the soil.
Then he plants tomatoes. His mother loved tomatoes.
They grow straight from seed, so fast and big
that the young man is amazed. He takes the first
ten into the kitchen. In their roundness,
he sees his mother’s breasts. In their smoothness
he finds the consoling touch of her hands.
Mother, mother, he cries, and flings himself
on the tomatoes. Forget about the knife, the fork,
the pinch of salt. Try to imagine the filial
starvation, think of his ravenous kisses.

On Stephen Dobyns

This guy has published lots of poems, novels, even a cool book of poetry essays.

I was stoked to find his book Cemetery Nights used (twice!) at bookstores in Denver. Denver must not like that book as much as I do, though I already have it in the pretty cool collection Velocities.

I bought one of the copies for Jeremy. I wish I would have gotten the other copy for someone.

I think Dobyns' poems will surprise people. Describing them is not like reading them. Narrative, strange imagination, in-line rhyming. Okay, well, maybe good. But yes, the majority of Dobyns' poems make me awestruck at the power of plain-spoken language.

But also, his use of questions sticks out to me, as I've been reading his collection Pallbearers Envying The One Who Rides.

Hey! That is an excellent title.

The first and third sections are about a character named Heart (gag, I know) who is an actual organ (gag) in a surreal way. He examines the nature of love, of forgiveness, etc. (gag!). Some cool stuff, but really not like his other stuff.

I blame a bad idea that was ran with.

I don't know if I want to read the third section.

BUT DON'T GET ME WRONG. THE MIDDLE SECTION A LONG POEM TITLED "Oh, Immobility, Death's Vast Associate" RULES.

The questions he uses, poses, constructs rule too, making me think about how I can use questions to guide my own writing (living?).

Here are four from that section:

"Is this what we see when we drive down the street? Men and women stuck to their porches, fabric of skin and fabric of home grown to be one, brains become the mental ditto marks of deck chairs?"

"I too like my memories but their caloric content is nil. Whoever got fat eating the past?"

"Where would we be if the book lacked a binding and the pages flew like birds about the room?"

"It's time to mingle your shoes with the buyers and sellers, one foot forward, then the next. The reality? To bang your drum in the mortal parade. And the dream? To believe yourself dancing." (the end)

It feels like Dobyns wants me here, reading, to interact more than merely read.

I'm thinking I'm thinking and that is good.

Dobyns had a piece in one of the early issue of The Collagist.

I'm still not sure I'm going to read the last section, more about Heart. Though maybe eventually.

The Best of (What's Left of) Heaven by Mairead Byrne sounds good.