Boiled Buttered
Potatoes
It’s
the small things that take me
down
some long hall—grief’s retort
room
I think’s been long cooled, brick broken
on
the beach after the ‘76 demolition. The
front
of
my tongue hums and hums after I’ve set
a
while and though I don’t smile
I
do open my mouth I do
and
I actually throb with word after word-
stuffed
under my teeth like what’s under
those
bricks at high tide and then what’s left
at
low tide, and the skin under the skin
of
my jaw is taut with small things: buttering potatoes,
the
split after they’d been boiled in their skins
then
drained and laid out in a plate:
one
little gold crown crusted with salt. She’d watch
it
almost melt, then hold the little glob of it
in
her mouth, oh, and squish
it
between her teeth, the grease
a
shiny lip and she’d laugh because
it
tickled—and we all burst
out,
the way any boiled thing still
in
its skin bursts out, the firm fluff
of
its stuff packed like a rack of sardines, sealed
to
cook in a steam so thick it’s hot fog,
hot
enough, just enough
(if
you’re careful)to see gold melt on it.
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