"Greek Salad"

Good morning folks!  I’m here with one of the poems I wrote in 2008 when I was just getting back into poetry after a 12 year hiatus.  This poem & others I wrote between May 2008 & February 2010 can be found in my book The Spring Ghazals, which is available here for $8.00—or, if you’re on a budget—free in pdf form.  Hope you enjoy the poem, & hope you consider giving The Spring Ghazals a whirl—I’m proud of the poetry in the book, which is very much "of a piece," & it’s also a very personal work that means a great deal to me.

Greek Salad

An heirloom tomato chopped not sliced a scarlet
daylily unfurled—page 27 of La physiologie du goût
in english translation the evening star blooming yellow this
Independence Day & yellow fireworks gesticulating
broadly over Indian Valley a butter-yellow
daylily unfurled—we were walking home from the
end of the world up the dirt road it’s only a
quarter of a mile roughly—a cucumber sliced
unpeeled tho—everything’s raw this evening
                                                                        another evening
the fog rolling southward along Divisidero it was
curtains sewn from cigarette smoke a greek
salad to go from the pizzeria on the corner at
Fulton—the raw raw lonesome air—
                                                                        another evening
the dogwoods budding whitely the smoke from a
Lucky Strike swirling hopeless thru the Virginia twilight the
sliced red onion the pale magenta
daylily unfurled in the garden this afternoon my
life a salad of recollections & flowers—a white plate a
white page speckled with words a white
daylily unfurled—the salad seasoned with
salt ground pepper oregano
                                                                        another evening
drinking Rolling Rock & heartbroken in Vermont a
kid only a kid really the purple sky’s a
bruise above the purple lake a purple
daylily unfurled this afternoon—crumbled
feta & pitted Kalamatas—it’s taken
52 years so far – these daylilies
unfurl briefly—they say Brillat-Savarin
dying left the world like a satisfied diner—
tho we’re walking back downhill
tho the sky’s folding its blue-violet petals

Jack Hayes
© 2010