Two Alley Songs for the Vegetable Man: St. Louis
I
I've never seen the vegetable man
but I know his litany and his bells
as he negotiates the alley mornings
when the sun's a bad idea coming up again.
I've tried to sleep right through him
but I've heard his customers
piling down fire escapes
and waving their thick hands:
the woman up from Fayetteville
whose robe is always undone.
The fat black man who beats his dog
when his check runs thin
and none of his numbers come up right.
Dozens of my neighbors abandoning their beds
and filling the alley with vegetable frenzy.
They go down to marvel
at the resiliency of lettuce, the humility
of corn, the artichoke's highmindedness.
They can't see or hear me rooting around
in my own dark garden of sleep.
They're busy being lifted
on the green wing of his song.
It might be all right, his song and dance,
if this were storybook Europe years ago
and I was staying with some kind family
hiding me from the town constabulary. Maybe
then I could take some comfort in his singing,
could thank him underneath my breath
for another day's auspicious sign.
But there's always a price on local color
this late in the century's season
where there's never enough sleep
to undo the day before
and the cartoon dog who guards our sleep
spins around and around on his leash.
Here comes another day
of fragile commerce in the world.
We want infinite wisdom
and somebody sells us potatoes. Unbelievably
out of love, we settle for tumescence.
I dream about tipping over his cart.
I'm setting it on fire and I'm laughing
while his produce rolls away free.
He'll never know how it could be worse,
how every time I wake up colorless
and hungry at noon, the day already
picked over for the brightest plums, I think
maybe tomorrow I'll leave my long bed
and yell down for a pound or sack of
what everyone else is having.
And he might turn his blank face up
and wonder where the hell I've been
all his life. For me he's been saving
the frivolous turnips,
the canteloupe's orange melancholy,
the ineffable sadness in the onion's heart
that's mine, all mine, for a song.
u
Here's to courage when the alley runs out
and the vegetable man sings his long way home.
That his children eat everything
that threatens to go bad and they grow wiser.
That the knife of his honest living
steels itself in its sheath by his bed.
That for him it continues to be this simple,
paring things down to their essential gist:
stalk and seed, pulp and core.
It's a faith that could sustain us too
if only we could see it steaming from the soup,
leaking from the colander,
shining round and hard in bowls
on tables we all set, hoping.
It's the charm we need to string around our necks
when the alley cuts its teeth after dark,
when the black man and his dog are talking
the common language of scream
and a woman is naked, crying in her window
while the wrong song comes out of the radio
and someone we don't know is running,
looking over his shoulder
as far as he can back into his life
and seeing it all in this one reflexive moment,
this last dispatch from the heart going out.
We need the man with his vegetable song
who's already dressing himself in the dark
to make it back another day
and wake us with the only love he knows
so we can say over and over and mean it
like the edge of his knife means its sure business,
like his own children mean each morning they're alive:
there's nothing in another night
the color of bruise, if it comes tonight,
can harm us.
Structure
94 lines · 10 stanzas