FRUIT MEAL
blue curtains watery fields
night falling entire meal of fruit
somewhere in The Netherlands my mother said
cut boiled baked roasted broiled peaches pears
plums bananas poached stewed pureed flambéed whipped
maybe one course tart and sweet one dish
exquisitely cooked yielding to teeth
juice on tongue willing it to stay escaping
down the throat nothing for it but to eat more
cherries apples strawberries grapes
raspberries blueberries apples pineapples oranges
tangerines mandarins memory embroidered
grapefruit enticing us to eat spread seeds
THIS WAS CALIFORNIA
My grandmother’s house had two half-doors,
Dutch doors, they called them.
The top unlatched from the bottom,
swung open, you could stick your head
out. Indoors mixing with sun
burning through fog,
eucalyptus, damp bricks of the patio.
Redwood boxes of fuchsias,
little explosions of red, pink, purple.
Unable to survive a freeze, I knew,
or being brought indoors, I learned
when I hung a basket on our porch
for a summer back east. They die
without the movement of air across the skin.
TO ALICE MUNRO
I read you in my forties. Christmas at my in-laws’,
my four-month-old knocked out with fever.
You wrote “Thanks for the Ride” in your twenties, newborn in a crib.
Lives of Girls and Women didn’t work until you put it in story form.
You knew you’d never write a real novel.
1973: teaching a class of men doing what was fashionable,
a woman’s story brought tears to your eyes, you said,
you hadn’t read a good piece of student writing in so long.
1986: the professor declared a scene Not Believable, Period.
The men shifted in their seats, assenting.
The one other woman and I huddled in the bathroom afterward.
I turned to poetry because I couldn’t write stories like yours,
mini-novels, unfolding forward and backward in time.
You told the woman not to take your class, to keep bringing you her stories.
She was the one, the only one, you said, from that year to become a writer.