"Riddle."
"It's like the queens and prostitutes
at the French court, all outwardness, all silk,
all corset.
The wind among them, my mother's voice.
Inside there's a waitress in a dull apron,
the flat pan of her face is chipped and pitted.
First, I notice how conventionally plain she is.
And then, the gold stubbled lip over which
a lover's tongue could wander.
All one summer, my hunger lunged for this,
or that green calabash, whose name
was as hollow as the sound of wooden tackle blown,
knocking at a mast.
Whose name was as round as the throat of a well,
down which I tossed my wishes to hear them throb
a message, whose name was artichoke.
Who is she kidding?
Who is she anyway, talking as though she knew?
When I can tell you, honey, she never
even saw an artichoke until she was 18, and went to Italy,
and got laid for the first time on the beach outside Talamone.
And even then, that girl didn't know how to spell artichoke
until she was 23.
But honey, you can't fit a girl like that
into the straitjacket of a book of poems.
I mean, no book of poems in the world
is big enough to explain how she got from Ely, Nevada,
to Talamone getting laid.
So she just pretends that poetry is an interstate,
and here we are passing Ely, here
we are copulating with Marco on the beach.
All the little stitches of explaining have been cut,
and we may faint dead away before she's going
to tell us what the truth is.
But honey, I will tell you one thing.
Life is like it's cooking, and Ely was spinach
untinned by grandma directly onto the plate,
so that its brackish backwash, leaking, weeping,
flooded the hominy.
It dripped off the china the way Columbus
thought the sea dripped off the lip at the end of the world.
Whole ships rode off into its darkness,
that the coffers of nations were squandered.
Artichokes, my God, this one could sell snow to the Eskimos.
This is America, honey, we don't need any damned artichokes."