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professional poetry


THE BUTCHER'S APRON.

Red stains on the clean white bib,
the butcher's apron hanging
like an abstract expressionist painting
on the museum wall of my
childhood

--the most we ever ordered--
a pound of hamburger
to be fried in the black iron skillet
till the edges formed an ugly crust
like a scab on a skinned knee/
The art of the grill
was not found in our manless house.

The beauty of the red on the butcher's
white canvas, which occasionally streaked like an etching
across the white butcher paper
in which he wrapped the chuck, never translated
to the food eaten; grey meats

like steel wool, canned vegetables
with the colors of hospital walls,
sliced white bread like old often-washed
sheets and pillowcases.

My shock one day in the school cafeteria
to see Carol Gregory
whose mother sewed her
dresses as elegant as those in
VOGUE magazine

unwrap a waxed paper packet of bright red
meat, in a puddle of something thin and dark/
to realize it was
Roast Beef,
the puddle
was beef blood! There in the Lowell School Cafeteria
I saw my first still life painting, beautiful and
different food among the Thermoses
of milk, the wax-wrapped peanut
butter or bologna sandwiches. Perhaps
I have added theis detail:
next to Carol's rare roast beef slices
(she did not have a sandwich--just
the meat) another piece of waxed paper on which
was spread
several spears of asparus.
Food eaten by the kids whose parents were rich
or had been to college
was different,
was like a painting?

My first-generation American mother grew up
in a house with a dirt floor, went to school
in a one-room school house. She drank German
coffee instead of milk
as a child. She lifted herself out
of North Dakota, beame a bookkeeper
but never learned

about food, the telltale calss
marking. in old age, she loves salty things like
Campbell's soups, fozen enchildadas in processed cheese sauce,
bacon white bread sandwiches and hates the nursing hospital
where the don't salt the food at all.

Plath imagined blood-red tulips in white hospitals
as I think of Georgia O'Keefe's poppies.
My mother who voted for Nixon and hates foreigners
dreams of those read and white cans
which might hold Chicken Noodle or Tomato
soups. She's never heard of Andy Warhol who
mimicked such cans, just as a butcher I talked to in our Michigan
supermarket said he had never eaten
shrimp or knew what people did with oxtails. his apron
too had the same bright red stains, not yet faded into
rust: crimson blood on canvas, the art
of childhood. Unhealed scars,
still capable of bleeding.

          from many mountains moving