After the Beagle Poem

My wife doesn't like Bukowski,
maybe for being a cynic
maybe for his words about women,
about his women, for the words,
for the anatomy of his dirty old mind.

But today I read her a poem about a beagle,
a poem by Chinaski himself,
and she swooned and she purred,
and I believe her heart even skipped a beat.

"Our beagle snuffles in his sleep," the old man writes,
and now my wife forgives him
of everything, acquits him of all charges,
every sin erased. She no longer
frowns when I come from the shower,
minutes before having recited "The Shower Poem"
or "Bluebird" while I washed the dirt away.

"Our beagle spreads a paw," he says,
and her shoulders drop
from the heavy weight of love
for a beagle she's never seen.

"Do not bother the beagle lying there,"
and do not bother a woman newly in love
as she sits, not sleeping
but relaxed into thoughts about pets,
particularly a dreaming beagle
who once must have slept
under the eye of a dirty old man.

The Lobster Tank

As we waited for our table
he came, a tender well-dressed man
with a kind smile and a well-groomed beard,
and pushed aside the glass top
and with a long combing prong
lifted the lobster from the blue-lit waters
for the cook.

"Look, sweetie," said one man, tugging
at his little girl. "Look at the lobster!"

The man paused so we could see it there,
then he placed it on a plain tray,
carried it away, pausing so the host and a waitress
could pat it on its shell, the waitress
making a sad puckering expression,
the host worried about the growing
waiting group of hungry guests.

I ate two pounds of snow crabs that night,
my wife ate a plate of coconut shrimp,
someone ate a lobster.

Cooking Tofu

First I take the vegetables,
peppers, snow peas, and carrots,
then a little butter.
I slice the tofu into quarters,
place them in the middle,
white blocks
surrounded with color,
think of it in its cooking body,
christen it
Small Pale Stonehenge
in Cut Garden.

After cooking them,
I take the tofu down the throat,
suck the juice from it,
one cube at a time,
crushing them at the gullet.

Odd curdled creature, milk in form,
ordered in shape
and given nothing to a flavor.

We make a world around us,
take what nature gives and orders it:

snow peas into measured bags,
carrots, eight to a bundle,
peppers, six to a pack,
tofu, strange wonderful tofu,
block of blandness, plain as its hue,
rubber lump of provision
I take into myself.

Of Red and White and Blue

In three tips
and thirteen folds
they gave her the weight
of grief
and the colors of war.

Lightly, the way one holds
a newborn,
they carried to her
and placed in her hands
the appreciation
of a grateful nation
and an empty seat
at the kitchen table
and dry and distant smiles
in hanging photos
and a cold spot on the bed
and a hate of a war and an unquenchable longing,
phantoms of waiting mixed with forgetfulness.

There in her lap
sat the source
of a stir of apparitions,
images
she had never seen
would never see
of his last expressions
the man who took him
the ones beside him
the country she gave him to
the bullet, the gun, the ground
he stood on, the ground he laid on,
the hands that touched him,
that pain that touched him,
the pain that touched her
and touched her
and touched her.