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You Down With OPP (Other People’s Poetry)?

Last night at a poetry reading in Cambridge, I heard the illustrious former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky read the following poem, “Tomatoes” by Stephen Dobyns. Pinsky claimed that he first recited this poem at a poetry outreach event in Iowa, when then-Governor Tom Vilsack (now the US Secretary of Agriculture) was going to read “Tomatoes” but had to leave before he had the chance. Vilsack, who apparently is a big supporter of poetry, later told Pinsky in an email that the poem reminded him of his mother, who had what her grandson had called “big pillows.” The whole antecdote smacks of political suicide, but the poetry-lovin’ liberals of Cambridge found it endearing. 

Other highlights of the poetry reading included Tom Magliozzi from Car Talk reading a dirty limerick about nuts and bolts, Michael Holley reading Lucille Clifton’s ‘Homage to My Hips,’ Bill Littlefield reading Ogden Nash’s ‘Columbus,’ and Steven Pinker reading poetry in the dull precise monotone of a genius cognitive scientist. 

Tomatoes

– by Stephen Dobyns –

A woman travels to Brazil for plastic

surgery and a face-lift. She is sixty

and has the usual desire to stay pretty.

Once she is healed, she takes her new face

out on the streets of Rio. A young man

with a gun wants her money. Bang, she’s dead.

The body is shipped back to New York,

but in the morgue there is a mix-up. The son

is sent for. He is told that his mother

is one of these ten different women.

Each has been shot. Such is modern life.

He studies them all but can’t find her.

With her new face, she has become a stranger.

Maybe it’s this one, maybe it’s that one.

He looks at their breasts. Which ones nursed him?

He presses their hands to his cheek.

Which ones consoled him? He even tries

climbing onto their laps to see which

feels most familiar but the coroner stops him.

Well, says the coroner, which is your mother?

They all are, says the young man, let me

take them as a package. The coroner hesitates,

then agrees. Actually, it solved a lot of problems.

The young man has the ten women shipped home,

then cremates them all together. You’ve seen

how some people have a little urn on the mantel?

This man has a huge silver garbage can.

In the spring, he drags the garbage can

out to the garden and begins working the teeth,

the ash, the bits of bone into the soil.

Then he plants tomatoes. His mother loved tomatoes.

They grow straight from seed, so fast and big

that the young man is amazed. He takes the first

ten into the kitchen. In their roundness,

he sees his motherís breasts. In their smoothness

he finds the consoling touch of her hands.

Mother, mother, he cries, and flings himself

on the tomatoes. Forget about the knife, the fork,

the pinch of salt. Try to imagine the filial

starvation, think of his ravenous kisses.

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