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John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

I Need to be More French. Or Japanese.-Beth Ann Fennelly



 

Then I wouldn’t prefer the California wine,

its big sugar, big fruit rolling down my tongue,

a cornucopia spilled across a tacky tablecloth.

I’d prefer the French, its smoke and rot.

Said Cézanne: Le mond-c’est terrible!

Which means, The world-it bites the big weenie.

People sound smarter in French.

The Japanese prefer the crescent moon to the full,

prefer the rose before it blooms.

Oh, I have been to the temples of Kyoto,

I have stood on the Pont Neuf, and my eyes,

they drank it in, but my taste buds

shuffled along in the beer line at Wrigley Field.

It was the day they gave out foam fingers.

I hereby pledge to wear more gray, less yellow

of the beaks of baby mockingbirds,

that huge yellow yawping open on wobbly necks,

trusting something yummy will be dropped inside,

soon. I hereby pledge to be reserved.

When the French designer learned

I didn’t like her mockups for my book cover,

she sniffed, They’re not for everyone. They’re

subtle. What area code is 662 anyway? I said,

Mississippi, sweetheart. Bet you couldn’t find it

with a map. Okay: I didn’t really. But so what

if I’m subtle as May in Mississippi, my nose

in the wine-bowl of this magnolia bloom, so what

if I’m mellow as the punch-drunk bee.

If I were Japanese I’d write about magnolias

in March, how tonal, each bud long as a pencil,

sheathed in celadon suede, jutting from a cluster

of glossy leaves. I’d end the poem before anything

bloomed, end with the rain swelling the buds

and the sheaths bursting, then falling to the grass

like a fairy’s castoff slippers, like candy wrappers,

like spent firecrackers. Yes, my poem

would end there, spend firecrackers.

If I were French, I’d capture post-peak, in July,

the petals floppy, creased brown with age,

the stamens naked, stripped of yellow filaments.

The bees lazy now, bungling the ballet, thinking

for the first time about October. If I were French,

I’d prefer this, end with the red-tipped filaments

scattered on the scorched brown grass,

and my poem would incite the sophisticated,

the French and the Japanese readers—

because the filaments look like matchsticks,

and it’s matchsticks, we all know, that start the fire.