Celeste Provencher

The Tomatoes

A blonde child brings
by a blue bucket with bulging
red tomatoes in it. I am ten
and the open door reveals
our neighbor’s chainsaw going haywire
like Einstein’s crazy hair. Imagine
if Albert had lived in the humid streets
of Dubai. He would have been too busy
controlling his hair
to come up with the theory of relativity.
He would have had a yellow bicycle
to ride away his days and get the air
flowing through his white strands.
He would have said “c’est la vie”
and gone on with his life, too busy
to consider rationalism
or the works of Proust.
 

 

The Neighbor

Mrs. Ripley bore two sets of twins.
The first set lived two
days. The second only had the
soup-course of life— Margaret dead
at fifteen, Joseph at twenty-four. Her husband
died in World War II.
M.I.A. No more letters
home. Her sister-in-law committed
suicide with a paring knife
in the upstairs back
bedroom. Ruined
a homemade quilt. A regular
Hitchcock screenplay. But her niece,
Clarise, comes to visit her every Tuesday.
They pull weeds from the beds
and tend to flower pots
that sit in front of the virgin
plastered Mary, cracked and milky,
who looks down at the flowers and keeps
her back to the lake.
 

 

 

Should I Say to the Dying Man?

Your wife of seventy-one years
doesn’t believe you’re dying,
but going on a trip.
Heaven is a place, I guess,
like Boise or Tuscaloosa.
But do they

have ice cream there?
Movie theatres
and private bathrooms? Or
are those nothing but
luxuries for the living? Do
the dead not pee? Not read?
Not go for Sunday drives
and live in nostalgia
from time to time?
Is it the end of
filet mignon and
pots de crème? Is there

any way to take a side trip
to Paris on the way up?
To lie on the grass,
look up at the Eiffel Tower,
take sips of Beaujolais
and watch the women
walking by— one last
fire in your loins, image
in your head.

 

 

Celeste Provencher was born in Manchester, NH. She attended Simmons College and Vermont College of Fine Arts where she earned an MFA in writing. Her poetry has aired on New Hampshire’s Portsmouth Community Radio and in the Portsmouth Poet Laureate Group’s anthology. She lives in Charlestown, MA with her husband.