This next poem is called "Death and the Pineapple".
And I read this poem at Stevens College in Missouri
a week or two ago.
And when I finished, I acknowledged a certain debt
to Ecclesiastes.
And some girl in the audience raised her hand
and said, what's Ecclesiastes?
Well, never mind.
I'll have a drink of water.
"Death and the Pineapple".
"The fruit itself, a giant pine cone.
Texture of an apple.
The taste-- an apple flavored with pine.
If I died, I couldn't eat pineapples.
Couldn't slice them with a large knife or say the word
that conjures the taste--
pie-napple, pine-apple.
Couldn't run my hands down the rough sides
or over the bushy top, let its juice drizzle down my chin
or wipe it away with the back of my hand, rub it in my hair,
gargle it, ponder the origin of its name,
throw it at a strange and beautiful woman on the Rue
Saint-Jacques, imagine a trip to Hawaii.
The pineapple is what we give up when
we die, along with strawberries, coffee, and sun.
The room hovers about me, one more skull.
The trees around the house, the sky around the trees,
the stars around the sky.
How could I escape so many enclosures?
What would I see?
What tastes, what sins?
And if existence exists in space, what space?
I can't imagine nothing.
A house I once visited at a pineapple
over the door, a pineapple on the newel post, a pineapple
in the center of the table.
Surely these people had lived.
They said it was their family crest.
It's my family crest, my sign, my life, and yours--
a galaxy of pineapples.
I considered all the pineapples growing under the sun
and will enjoy the good of my labor, all the days
of my pineapple for there is a wicked man who
prolongeth his pineapple and his wickedness.
And not a just man on Earth that doeth good and sinneth not."