ART not hard, ART true and easily come. ART there.

within mine spindly bloom

cotton thistle

crevice and protected cave: womb, bellybutton, orifice, vagina

big belly built to hold all the painful love snaking through miles of intestines

soft and flowering, crab-like lungs

This is a nest. Two cupping palms. Insides resting in support and moving outwards.

who knew it’d be purple?

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Ode To An Artichoke

The artichoke

of delicate heart

erect

in its battle-dress, builds

its minimal cupola,

keeps

stark

in its scallop of scales.

Around it,

demoniac vegetables

bristle their thicknesses,

devise

tendrils and belfries,

the bulb’s agitations,

while under the subsoil

the carrot

sleeps sound in its

rusty moustaches.

Runner and filaments

bleach in the vineyards,

whereon rise the vines.

The sedulous cabbage

arranges its petticoats;

oregano

sweetens a world;

and the artichoke

dulcetly there in a gardenplot,

armed for a skirmish,

goes proud

in its pomegranate

burnishes.

Till, on a day,

each by the other,

the artichoke moves to its dream

of a marketplace

in the big willow

hoppers:

a battle formation.

Most warlike

of defilades-

with men

in the market stalls,

white shirts

in the soup-greens,

artichoke field marshals,

close-order conclaves,

commands, detonations,

and voices,

a crashing of crate staves.

 

And

Maria

come

down

with her hamper

to

make trial

of an artichoke:

she reflects, she examines,

she candles them up to the light like an egg,

never flinching,

she bargains,

she tumbles her prize

in a market bag

among shoes and a

cabbage head,

a bottle

of vinegar; is back

in her kitchen.

The artichoke drowns in a pot.

 

So you have it:

a vegetable, armed,

a profession

(call it an artichoke)

whose end

is millennial.

We taste of that sweetness,

dismembering scale after scale.

We eat of a halcyon paste:

it is green at the artichoke heart.

– Pablo Neruda.

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ar-ti-choke

[ahr-ti-chohk]

1. a tall, thistle-like composite plant, Cynara scolymus, having pinnately divided leaves and large discoid heads of bluish flowers. The numerous scalelike bracts and receptacle of the immature flower head are eaten as a vegetable. Native to the Mediterranean region.

2. the large, rounded, closed flower head itself.

3. Jerusalem Artichoke.

Also called Globe Artichoke (for defs. 1 and 2)

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