Two Poems:

The Demise of Camembert

I remember my mother squeezing
the camembert. She bought it five days

before unwrapping it, unwrapped it
two hours before she served it.

But what the French sociologist calls
la déstructurisation of family meals

means there’s no more patience
for ripening on the cold shelf.

This message comes to us
on a tray with quick-serve cheddar puffs

passed across the cocktail party,
across news networks via satellite.

Also it lands thudding with the flat bread,
bean salad, raisins, fruit bar,

seedless jam and plastic cutlery
in the humanitarian airdrop.

Pah! A man rejects the bland cheese couplets.
And the premoistened serviette.

In this world he fears annihilation.
This world has made him a nihilist.

Now he sits on a bed, on the bedspread
in a motel on the edge of Las Vegas

or a hotel near Narita Airport,
eating an engineered salty snack,

planning deaths designed his way,
getting more and more thirsty.

So hear me. Compassion begins in the pasture.
Adoration of cow breed, grass strain,

the certain season for milking,
the way the curd is cut and pressed

and salted and cured and shaped,
the time and temperature at each stage.

The marketing man from Coeur-de-Lion,
the number-one brand of camembert,

is revising the résumé of his ripe life.
And you and I, paring away the rind,

do you and I have a patient nose
for the creamy inwardness of things?

Light Fingers

Feather duster in a child’s grip
swished over bottles of Old Grand-Dad
in my father’s liquor store,
my hand hovering briefly
above rolls of coin in the cash drawer,

other objects stolen from local merchants –
a magnifying glass,
a hi-lo thermometer, an Indian rubber baseball,
novelties, candy, cigarettes:

If you wouldn't give me what I deserved,
what you seemed to promise,
then I would take it from you.
The splendor of scissors.
The consideration of a rubber stamp
"for your attention."

At some point, after the accumulation
of the objects of desire,
and later, after they became unforgettable,
beyond understanding and useless,

this is when I looked back and saw the boy
making a daring effort to be part
of the family’s sadness.

All of the grief that preceded me –
war, fire, the destruction of culture,
the powerlessness of parents,
the compensations of shameful inward lives –

this, I perceived, is simply what it means
to be human. So now there is nothing
to wrest into myself,
for myself.
But there is the spirit leaping with dread

and exultation, demanding everything.
And the old cunning.

When Mrs. O’Brien suggested that Joseph,
her son, and I go to see his priest
about our common venal behavior,
my mother, a Holocaust survivor,
threw her out of the house.

I returned to my favorite pastime:
a book of sleight-of-hand tricks,
small objects, all objects, vanishing.

Ron Slate
The Incentive of the Maggot
Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize
Selected by Robert Pinsky
A Mariner Original
Houghton Mifflin Company

Copyright © 2005 by Ron Slate.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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