Varieties of Interpretation
Right now I’m as happy as it’s possible for me to be.
I’m not a particularly optimistic person.
I have a beer and it is cold.
I’ve put some vegetables on the grill.
I’m sitting outside next to the barbeque.
I hear the sizzle of olive oil from beneath the lid.
A book of World Poetry, impressively thick,
is on the ground beside me.
I’m trying not to burn the vegetables.
Here’s a list:
red and green bell peppers
yellow squash
round zucchini
red onion
green Anaheim chiles
Yukon gold potatoes – slices.
In the Sunday paper is a picture of a
Bulldog gang member with a “Fresno” tattoo
that spans his large belly.
Vicente Fernandez is called the Sinatra of Mariachi.
Why would you want to know this?
Almost certainly you wouldn’t.
In certain company I would be embarrassed
by the car in my garage.
The air conditioner on top of the house
just kicked on;
how foreign that would be in rural Guatemala,
say,
where I was once, looking out the bus window
at barefoot farmers among hillside terraces of corn.
The thing is to relax and realize
that cataclysm can’t be foretold,
at least not to those of us who eschew prophecy.
Christy exclaims from the kitchen inside
where she has dropped the scissors
making a gouge
In the less than six-month old hardwood floor.
The goat in a hut somewhere just shit on the dirt floor
and no one seems particularly concerned.
We live where fire can join wind and melt metal,
but it’s been more than fifty years.
There is a breeze now and a quarter moon hangs
at what seems a strange
but is no doubt a common and entirely predictable angle.
And you could ask, with some legitimacy,
what I mean.
And I would have an answer if I could teach
the insect barely big enough for my vision
to register its existence and that is weaving
across the bottom of this page
to talk.
And now I am a little drunk, but not much
and there’s a swarm of those living specs
finding their purposefully varied directions
all over this poem
indicating the varieties of interpretations
that even the purest instinct derives
from this or any other art
or facsimile thereof.
Suddenly
It is always sudden—
dramatic emphasis achieved
through startling speed.
The panhandler stands,
drops his misspelled
cardboard sign,
and breaks into an aria
in a baritone
that could only have arisen
from an Italian opera,
and stops traffic
with his version
of something that suggests
a national anthem
from the republic
of the proudly
and gladly
dispossessed.
Mike Cole was born in Fresno, California and graduated from Fresno State College in 1971. His first book, The New Alchemy, is making the rounds of publishers. His poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Laurel Review, Blast Furnace, and elsewhere. He lives in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California.