Still Life with Frying Pan, Fight, and Flower Pot
How beautiful it is
to break an egg
into the waiting pan
to repot a plant
grown too wild for its housing
to see crumbs
of soil spilled onto the
just-cleaned floor
How beautiful it is
to see someone walk away
in anger and swallow
the words that would
call them back
How beautiful the bright lights
that make of the window
an opaque slate
In the pan
the egg yolk whitens
like a cataract clouding an eye
Outside the window
darkness draws close
like it wants something
On the floor
potting soil crunches
beneath my socked feet
From the next room
my partner fumes
like a kettle about to boil
but in the kitchen
I am unappeasing
my mouth filled with egg
Mr. S
after Lydia Davis
He wants to be a good manager. So in summer, for example, when he knows his women will swaddle themselves in slacks and sweaters, he slides the thermostat to 60, refusing to relent in his quest for goodness until he sees them shiver with gratitude, arms tucked in thick sleeves, hands like nervous centipedes emerging reluctantly to skate across the keyboard.
He wants to be a good manager, especially to L., with whom he cannot make eye contact for more than a moment before he is completely enflamed. He likes her, likes the way her soft body fills sensible office-wear. She sits in view of his window, facing away, and he documents unyieldingly the time she has stolen from him as he stares at the roll of fat peeking out of each cap-sleeve. He wants nothing more than to lay his head in the rising dough softness of her armpit, smell the yeast of her body, warm on the embers of her glands.
But good managers do not bake bread with inferiors and he wants, above all, to be good. So he is harsher with her than with the other employees; he asks more, gives less, speaks in short, clipped sentences that hide completely, he thinks, how badly he wants to knead her doughy stomach between his fingers. When he dares to look in her eyes he finds the spark of mirrored longing, and he loves her more for the noble restraint she shows, as he shows it.
But then she gossips with the other women, there is talk of a first date, and he is scorched by the sudden realization that other men are not so good. Ignited by this fear he stands over her desk until she says, ‘sir?’ and the two of them live and die in that syllable, because in the moment after he tells her that he loves the smell of yeast, there is no flame of recognition. She is just puzzled, and he can’t hear her response over the roar of burning, loud as bonfire, loud as a pyre.
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