Avocado
An avocado rests
on the kitchen windowsill;
luxurious pod of green light,
globe and oblong moon of summer.
Runes ripple the dark skin
as though it had passed through fire.
And set in the jade of its buttery flesh,
the dark brown nut like rubbed mahogany.
Take a long knife and cut the avocado
in two. Cradle it in your two hands.
The scent is slightly musty, like an old well
where all five senses come to drink and drowse.
Basque Cooking
Plenty of potatoes, garlic and lamb.
Bundles of sage and jugs of harsh red wine.
Spring trout, its iridescent flanks
poached to a flaky pink.
Heels of dark bread with pig feet soup.
Fiddle head ferns
fried in olive oil and thyme.
There’s stewed rabbit with tomatoes,
and toasted sheep’s milk cheese.
Mutton with white beans and parsley
simmered over an oak fire—in nearly everything
the savor of wood smoke, even in the luminous,
black-eyed prawns a la plancha
bristling with salt.
Bliss
--for Robin
The tomatoes cool themselves
in the long breezes,
hoarding in their flesh
fabulous waters.
In the dry season, they are red cups
drinking summer light.
Late August, they grow lustrous,
dense in wild, scarlet clusters.
I have come for them
with a basket and a knife,
my thirst ripened.
Picked, they shine in my hand
like wet stones, their skin like ours
burnished after love.
Richard Hedderman is a multi-Pushcart Prize nominated poet whose most recent book of poems is Choosing a Stone (Finishing Line Press.) His work has appeared in dozens of literary journals both in the U.S. and abroad, and his poems have been collected in several anthologies including In a Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare (University of Iowa Press.) Formerly Writer-in-Residence at the Milwaukee Public Museum, he’s been a Guest Poet at the Library of Congress and teaches creative writing at Mount Mary University. He lives in Milwaukee.
An avocado rests
on the kitchen windowsill;
luxurious pod of green light,
globe and oblong moon of summer.
Runes ripple the dark skin
as though it had passed through fire.
And set in the jade of its buttery flesh,
the dark brown nut like rubbed mahogany.
Take a long knife and cut the avocado
in two. Cradle it in your two hands.
The scent is slightly musty, like an old well
where all five senses come to drink and drowse.
Basque Cooking
Plenty of potatoes, garlic and lamb.
Bundles of sage and jugs of harsh red wine.
Spring trout, its iridescent flanks
poached to a flaky pink.
Heels of dark bread with pig feet soup.
Fiddle head ferns
fried in olive oil and thyme.
There’s stewed rabbit with tomatoes,
and toasted sheep’s milk cheese.
Mutton with white beans and parsley
simmered over an oak fire—in nearly everything
the savor of wood smoke, even in the luminous,
black-eyed prawns a la plancha
bristling with salt.
Bliss
--for Robin
The tomatoes cool themselves
in the long breezes,
hoarding in their flesh
fabulous waters.
In the dry season, they are red cups
drinking summer light.
Late August, they grow lustrous,
dense in wild, scarlet clusters.
I have come for them
with a basket and a knife,
my thirst ripened.
Picked, they shine in my hand
like wet stones, their skin like ours
burnished after love.
Richard Hedderman is a multi-Pushcart Prize nominated poet whose most recent book of poems is Choosing a Stone (Finishing Line Press.) His work has appeared in dozens of literary journals both in the U.S. and abroad, and his poems have been collected in several anthologies including In a Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare (University of Iowa Press.) Formerly Writer-in-Residence at the Milwaukee Public Museum, he’s been a Guest Poet at the Library of Congress and teaches creative writing at Mount Mary University. He lives in Milwaukee.
