Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, LIVING IN THE CANDY STORE, by LEONARD KRESS


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

LIVING IN THE CANDY STORE, by                    
First Line: The scent still rose from the cellar's cold marble slab
Subject(s): Home


Thus a distinguished German naturalist has asserted the weakest part of my
theory is that I consider all organic beings imperfect.
-- Darwin, The Origin of Species

The scent still rose from the cellar's cold marble slab,
large enough to lay out, sponge down, and re-dress
a dead family, years after the last butter cream
cooled down on it. Strangers still knocked on the grated door
even after we trashed the sign and displayed
our own kids instead, in the huge plate glass window.
Where's old Elsie Ness, they said, that old German Lady,
whose father played the thundering organ? We sold the pipes
but it didn't help -- others came. The man whose pee
trickled in each day from the alley, the Belfaster
who bartered guns for whiskey and passed out
on our stoop, the lady who peeled off her shirt
and revved to the swerving cranked car radios, her nipples
like stogies. She came too, pressing them up
against our window. All that sweetness,
noxious as sewer gas, we wanted it all
for ourselves -- the infrastructure
of our longing. Out back, in the bricked-in
walled-up garden, the barren nectarine tree went wild,
overloaded and drooping, dark ooze scaffolding
its branches, and bushels of flaming globules
uncontained, supersweet, inedible.

Copyright © Leonard Kress.






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