Sometimes you’re in New Orleans for a bachelorette weekend with your favorite ladies and you meet a Vermont poet with a typewriter on the street and you ask for a poem please and he writes you one and you like it a lot and you pay him $8 which seems like a lot to you but seems like a little to him since he just had a woman hand him two crisp twenties for her poem. And maybe if this happens to you you feel a little bit like the world is helping you out, throwing you a bone, or in this case, a Ben.
Fruit
Clementine, you say,
already tasting it.
Apricot, and the word is caught
on your tongue (lone muscle
of both language & hunger) (the word
itself you peel and undress).
In the night you wake,
find yourself in an orchard –
don’t you don’t you
You cannot sleep for the sound
of apples falling all around you,
words heavy on the branch.
Even trees let go their fruit.
Nothing weighs more
than a burden refused (say the apples
touching each other in the grass)
***
panache, perhaps 