Friday poetry: Two short ones featuring food

Haiku Ambulance
Richard Brautigan (1950)

A piece of green pepper
fell
off the wooden salad bowl:
so what?

This is just to say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

– William Carlos Williams

(1934)

Friday poetry classics: John Donne, The Flea

The Flea
John Donne

Mark but this flea, and mark in this
How little that which thou deniest me is;
It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,
And this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou knowest that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pampered, swells with one blood made of two,
And this, alas, is more than we would do.

O stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, yea more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed and marriage temple is;
Though parents grudge, and you, we’re met
And cloistered in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that, self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?
Yet thou triumphest, and sayest that thou
Findest not thyself nor me the weaker now.
æTis true. Then learn how false fears be:
Just so much honor, when thou yieldest to me,
Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.

Dominick Dunne

In my Insurance Law class this evening the professor began the class with an exercise wherein we all recalled current events and then searched for ways the events related to insurance.  So many celebrities died this summer!  Perhaps they just hit the ejection seat before the swine flu fear pandemic drives the rest of us crazy.

Dominick Dunne passed today.  I grew up intimately familiar with Dunne’s writing because I read Vanity Fair compulsively after a breathtaking 1996 article called The Last Opium Den (now a book!) captured my attention and kept me loyal to the magazine.

Dunne wrote primarily about lifestyle.  He joined F. Scott Fitzgerald’s genre, inspiring voyeurs’ fantasies of a quintessentially American aristocratic style.

More personally, Dunne wrote one of the most memorable pieces tattooed on my brain from those formative years.  I’ve blogged about it before — Dunne’s account of his brother’s marriage to Joan Didion.  I’m sure this is far from Dominick’s own favorite pieces of his portfolio.  But this article has stuck with me for years, and has informed my search for how love is supposed to feel.