Louise in Love by Mary Jo Bang

Author:Mary Jo Bang
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802196569
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2001-03-17T05:00:00+00:00

TRAVEL IS EASY BY TRAIN

Don’t you love a narrow corridor? Ham asked. Only one way

to get lost, or to find. It was the year of the rat,

shunned overachiever, and late in a day that was long.

The girl in the icy-blue coat gave them her eyes,

only to take them right back.

We’re all like her, Louise said, twice ourselves

in a window’s reflection, alone on the train.

They watched both sides of a coin as it slipped past

the point of divide. Outside they could see

February’s first flowering—a fictional rose, goatsbeard up early.

They listened to inaudible inches mince toward,

unfeasible finches flap toward. It was time for lunch.

They are best, Ham explained, as he plucked figs from a basket,

taken in bites, like bits of tissue gnawed from a vole bone

or consumed like the lone shark

released from the jail bars of a grill bed—swallowed not whole

but maintaining at all costs each bite its bitness

for the textured toboggan ride south.

His napkined neck nodded his head with its pillbox

engraveled with thought.

. . .

So much to ignore, he said, to find flower instead in the fork,

which needs be held in the hand and never let fall

out of flavor. Yes, like that. Of course—he turned

to the other—taste always finds us.

The new, Louise said, blasphemes. You know it does.

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