
What To Wear, The Black or the Yellow
I wake into the bitter sadness of the world
deciding who to be, how to participate.
I drink my coffee, listen to the news,
read James Wright's "The First Days,"
how the
huge golden bee (ploughs)
His burly right shoulder into the belly
Of a sleek yellow pear
I consider fortifying my reclusion,
after all, each of us, born into being
through the whip of their mother,
is only a bulb condensing at the tip of a branch,
something round and pearly,
an isolated fruit or drop of water.
But something in the determination of the letters,
in how the words fill the mouth with a syrupy sugar
informs me that I am not only the poor pear, pendent,
but I am also eating the pear.
The poem shoulders me into presence,
cleans me as a river does, water over detritus, dirt.