Medley

 

Medley 30 x 24 cm acryl on canvas by Karin Goeppert

THE SWEET AND THE SOUR

Keep going, she said, never stop.

The first place was a window seat

near a picture of Mary and her Little Lamb,

the window right above an approximately vertical   

driveway and she, unofficial goddess of mirth,

threatening to dangle us from the window ledge. Proving?

Even mothers can have a fairly fucked-up sense of humor.

The second place had lemons and limes

pieces of which floated in the potent beverages

   of village elders.

The third place was a desert landscape.

A cactus garden in the side yard. It scared me. It

was too sharp. There was grapefruit with sugar sprinkled on top

paving a soft pink highway to the sweet and sour, the wisdom

of precisely mixed opposites, and that you could eat them with breakfast.

Then:

                                                                              a seminal scene

from Fellini Satyricon: a naked African girl

in bed with two smitten bi-sexual boys,

chattering in a pretty language no man can understand

but wants to listen to for the rest of his life, her breasts

like two small perfect fruits you might find

ripening in some amply watered oasis in Ethiopia or Somalia,

her hands like elegant birds hovering in space—

though where the sour amid all of this sweetness might be

found is not entirely clear, and should remain so,

and why this scene should be deemed “seminal” is

not all that clear either, but we will leave it at that—

and a crucial moment in “Sentimental Education” when Flaubert

has Frederic Moreau feel compassion for the gray haired woman

he glimpses briefly behind shutters,

the older woman he was obsessed with in his youth

when the sweet and the sour

wouldn’t have been seen on the same plate together

speaks for itself, and that is enough.