Every once in a while just to test myself,
I arbitrarily pick a word, a pretty hard word
from the dictionary and force myself
to write a poem about it.
I'm sure some of you have done the same thing.
It's, I think, a pretty good exercise.
Usually it's pretty fruitless.
But once in a while, it leads you into pretty strange alleys.
So I think I picked what, to me at least,
is the toughest word of them all.
Each of us would have his own toughest word.
But mine was "rutabaga. " And to me,
I don't think I've ever eaten a rutabaga,
and I'm not sure what they are.
But they seem to me like stinking turnips.
I've always had bad associations with them.
And all the better reason, of course,
to force oneself to write a poem about it.
One word in here is the yatagan.
It's a-- that's a curvy sword, a curvy Turkish sword.
I think you've seen them.
"Rutabagas."
"When the fireman gets home, he tries to be gentle.
All he wants from his wife, distraught with homemaking,
is a steaming bowl of mashed rutabagas.
[LAUGHING]
Just imagine sitting in the station for 14 days and nothing
happens.
You have to imagine your work, the house itching with flames,
and the little girls with eyes grown into horse
chestnuts ready to jump if you don't come.
After the tension of that hiatus, he needs to face it,
to feel it in his hands as the wealthy esthete does
thinking about it for years.
And then seeing the right painting, love at for a sight,
takes it home, a kind of happiness,
a kind of homogenized yellow satisfaction,
a sensation that might be hot or cold, pleasure or pain.
And so finished, he scrapes back in his chair
and off at last to real sleep, to be greeted
by the mongrel dog wide awake in the middle of the bed mouthing
the sock, the tongue, the orange yatagan that did her
in, reborn victim of the fire within,
talking about it all night long, enough to drive
any fireman mad."