The Mad Life of Tomato Worms

by Ian Kreiger

For D.G.

The valley between house and garage
gone the way of nasturtiums.
Somehow the light in your portrait of J.
was for a time the essence of shadow on the edge of vine,
how things are chosen to grow by place and time.

Time that was a stipend about to end
portended now through foreshadow of emotional tension
immersed in inchoate psychedelic decadence
certainly an unearthly green ripening, maybe to eat
maybe to take to bed.

Creepiness, the weird history of things
that crawl through sweet flesh
too much like the metaphor left unsaid
when she abandoned you for a passion felt
you wanted instead of the irritation of frantic genius
that did not make it all the way through sex
to the other side, to the harvest.

Now you are long finished and she's at another place
that's neither Dorothy Parker nor Gertrude Stein
the dream of literature dances like it might for Proust or death
in the lost land of nuance and nuisance,
more the reason for history than histrionics in that strange house,
which fate grew from seed.

Fate grown wild for lack of any other way
from what we all figured that art yet to be would solve
had not the unforeseen worms foreshadowed turn.

Tomatoes emotion might have harvested had it not failed
from what sometimes arrives out of nowhere
to beat us to the sun ripened fruit flesh
while leaving bone to what attacks harder
more eternal things, which try to figure their way out alone
and into the larder.

 

© 2005 Ian Kreiger

Born (South) Bronx, New York. Long time resident of Venice, California, currently living in Dunedin Florida. Former CEO of an international logistics company. Books, Pavans (Ommation Press) and An Unnamed Aesthetic (Stolen Images Press). Founder (emeritus) The Eternal Recurrence of 1957 Movement, Southern California Chapter. Proud member of The Jack Benny Fan Club and The Harry Stephen Keeler Society. Itinerant metaphysician, born again bon vivant and up-and-coming epistemological fool.