Saturday, July 9, 2011

Extreme Love















I know this woman.
She is all tenderness, and tendony, inside.
She makes pie.
wonderful, delicious love-pie, that she loves
because she loves, 'cause she's alive and
She loves pie.
Well, who doesn't?

She loves the pie and she loves the people who buy her pie.
But she hates the pie too.
She hates the hot, dirty kitchen (which she loves, because she do)
and she hates all the days gone by
sweating up to her elbows in blueberry goo.

And she says that she hates it but this is what she does.
She makes pie (and sushi) and loves it, because.

I visit her in her kitchen, where she rolls it all while bitchin'
and her six cats prowl around the margins
of her skinny, beefy-muscle, pie-making mama vibe.

She picks up road kill animals
and makes puppets from them because
she can't stand to see them die
on the side
And I used to think this was gross.
I mean, this girl's got a baby deer corpse on marionette cords
hanging just next to her bed from the ceiling
and to my mind
this i just some sick semi-taxidermy action gone astray--
"But... its because I love them so much," she says.
She say.

And now I get it.
This is just Extreme Love.
Love so convicted, it hauls back the dead
and strange as it may seem, they hang from a thread
beckoning with their hollow skin
and dead eyes.
Meanwhile, in the kitchen
she's pounding out more pies
working out the kinks in the dough with a roller
rolling up rawness in a sea-weed stroller

She wants a child yesterday,
so hopefully, tomorrow.
She wrestles with her discontent while
delicately shifting ingredients
in some new and tangy recipe.
Why does it go this way, she asks,
does it have to be?

With tears in her eyes now, she stifles a guffaw
and her flat bellied laugh spills all over the floor
'cause her neighbor just burst in from the back in a bra
and he's SO high... on something strange...

like fungus, or deer poo, or vegetable brain.
She has to sit down now, she's laughing so hard
and its time for that beer that makes it more bearable--
there's 30 pies finished, so nothing's that terrible.

I love her.
Like, Extreme Love love her.
Like, toss 30 excellent pies into the dumpster, love her
or fling-your-body-in-front-of-a-train to stop her
like
Haul ass cross-country in a three wheeled Ferrari
to put your arms around her in a crisis.
But she does not ask me to do any of this.

Because she's practical, not strategic.
She's tactical, and tactile, and heck, I'm allergic--
to the six cats, that is, not to her
so she rolls herself into them and falls asleep as they purr.

The next morning she's up early, and at it again
pounding her dough-flesh into raw pastry good-ness
that she imagines will bring joy into other peoples' lives...

The woman's got dreams

Meanwhile, there's pies.

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