John Palen

CANNING PEACHES

Here is the question of peaches, the fleshy way they twirl against one another in comment. — JodiAnn Stevenson

The USDA booklet is generally good
its concise plain English
sufficient to keep you from
wasting a bushel of fruit
scalding yourself
or poisoning your family

but there are a few other
things to say

Bought peaches won’t be evenly ripe
some still hard and green
despite deceptive blushes where the sun has reached
but you’ll find the ready ones
by pressing your thumb lightly
the way you’d touch a person’s cheek

Peeling a peach: tacit knowledge made flesh
so inadequate are the directions
to dip them in boiling water
then in cold

Misjudge either ripeness or timing
and tarbaby parchment clings in strips
to the fingers of one hand
then the other

but get it right
and a thumb brushing outward from the stem cavity
that concave navel
loosens a delicate membrane
to pull away
down to the blossom end

The peach almost undresses itself

Later
nearing sleep
you imagine the jars in rows on the kitchen counter
cooling the last few degrees
gleaming even in darkness

and your body remembers
the give and take of work
the way you sometimes remember sex

until the memory ebbs
a tide going out
and then because it has already gone
you let it go

 

 

RUSTLING BRICK

St. Louis brick is prized by Southern developers
for its quality and craftsmanship — News Item

I remember St. Louis brick
deep red substance of working class houses
apartment buildings
parish churches like St. Agatha
St. Ambrose on The Hill

The city fathers
banned combustible construction
after the fire of 1849
and rich Missouri clay fed a hundred brickworks

Craftsmen wore neckties to work
made bricks made beer

Today the city burns again
a little every day
vacant buildings torched
and gutted

and the bricks
their mortar stripped by high-pressure hoses
are carried off in beater trucks
when they’ve hardly had a chance to cool

Some wind up in Texas
Florida
some in New Orleans
one old French river city transfusing itself into another
in a trickle of red

and how will a man
in a filthy tee and pajama bottoms
eat if he doesn’t steal
good brick just lying around
and sell it for what he can get?

 

 

John Palen is a poet, fiction writer, journalist and retired journalism professor. He has been publishing poetry in literary journals and anthologies for four decades. His latest publications are Open Communion: New and Selected Poems (Mayapple 2004), Harry Truman All the Way (Pudding House 2008) and Drizzle and Plum Blossoms: Four Poets of the Song Dynasty, with Li C. Tien (March Street 2009). Recently retired from Central Michigan University, John lives in Midland MI.