Last night, I attended a poetry reading in Cambridge featuring none other than the illustrious former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. Among the highlights was his reading of Stephen Dobyns’ poem Tomatoes. Pinsky recounted how he first performed this piece at a poetry outreach event in Iowa, where then-Governor Tom Vilsack—now the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture—was slated to read it but had to leave prematurely.

According to Pinsky, Vilsack later emailed him, saying the poem reminded him of his mother, who, as described by her grandson, had “big pillows.” Somehow, this anecdote managed to hover on the edge of political disaster while still endearing itself to the poetry-loving liberals of Cambridge. The room, predictably, ate it up.

The night had no shortage of memorable moments. Tom Magliozzi of Car Talk fame delivered a dirty limerick about nuts and bolts that I’m sure made even the workshop-savvy blush. Michael Holley brought the house down with his reading of Lucille Clifton’s Homage to My Hips, and Bill Littlefield charmed us all with Ogden Nash’s Columbus.

But the pièce de résistance? Steven Pinker, the genius cognitive scientist, reading poetry in a tone so meticulously dull and precise that it could have been mistaken for an algorithm trying to emulate human emotion. The contrast between the words and the delivery was almost poetic in itself.

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.