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Tea
Kettle Requiem
The tea kettle moans,
grieving for the days
it would not only whistle but sing,
fountains of steam
rising from its 3-ring silver
spout,
its moans soon joined
by a chorus of
voices
keening from inside its domed
and dented
copper-green belly
I extinguished the flame
but
the kettle kept wailing,
cups it had filled adding loud
cracks
along with a clatter of saucers, brabble
of
spoons. I could no longer stand
such caterwaul, walked into
the night,
dumped that ancient kettle in the trash
Yet
no matter how I swaddled it
with the Sunday Times, my best
quilt and shawl, a handsewn tapestry,
the kettle kept
howling. Terrified,
my neighbors screamed: had a pack
of wolves or rockets attacked the city?
But after the
cops and the bomb squad,
FBI and Homeland Security
cautiously hauled off the kettle
I myself began
keening
in the pre-dawn silence--
not from guilt
or alarm
but a frantic desire for tea.
Manhattan
Marigolds
I walked with head down
searching crevices and sidewalk cracks
for a single
marigold
in bloom despite the bottle-caps,
cigarette butts, wads of gum
discarded from centuries of
mouths,
now a black rash spread across
the city?s flanks.
Once I saw two feeble threads of grass
between
MacDougal St. cobblestones,
once something mustard-yellow
near Herald Square that turned out to be
a drop of
dogshit; days and blocks later
a precarious gleam on a
subway grate:
just a brass tine from a broken comb.
Weary
of walking head down,
after scores of false sightings
I convinced myself I?d never find
a marigold to
match the one
that blooms in a jar inside me.
So I shifted to searching for replicas
of the many
other
rare and lovely things conjured within
What
the Round Things Mean
In the same
aerial photo
there?s a cluster of mushrooms,
umbrellas of
a crowd
holding a massive protest,
upside -down tea
cups
set out to dry on wide racks,
the bowed heads
of penitents,
a turtle convention, a village
whose huts
cling so closely
they could be a colony of barnacles--
Photographers love
to look down at such spectacles
but the mere blink of an eye
changes matter, so the issue
of meaning is up to the viewer.
As in the next shot,
a Rorschach of water glasses
caught from a ladder?s
highest rung.
The half -empty people insist
those round
things are severed heads;
the half - full contend
they
are dunes and slopes.
Literalists see only lopsided circles
as drawn by a child.
But genuine rebels prefer
to
smash the glasses to slivers,
such an act creating,
from
a photographer?s viewpoint,
the best image of all.
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