By Trenton Hickman
The point of the whole thing
Is that mandolins and fruit bowls
Are so infrequently at ease together
On wooden tables
Crowded with plaster arms, not to mention
Arms that clutch rigid white bars and smash them
Through gray shadows, slivering them
Into hints of a thousand fists.
So much coiled on a lonely table:
Music, food, violence. An orange cloth
Curls around each item—charms,
Warms, dominates.
2.
The mandolin speaks its strings as an aside, exposes
The gaping hole in its belly. When it is strummed
Alongside the plaster arm, the mandolin feels
The green islands of fruit tremble
In the sea of their wide bowl, senses how
Its muted chords shiver the trapped sunlight of their juice.
3.
This is a rule that all children instinctively know.
Four legs, planks split from trees
Resilient with unsapped history, dark
Stains of knotty wood screwed up
Into discreet silence. Place a mandolin
On the table’s top, spread a bowl of fruit wide
In surrender, splay a plaster arm still raw
Will not creak. It will support the weight
Of secrets with strength to spare.
Could be less plebeian than it appears.
Velvet, perhaps? Some sort of tinted chamois?
With the muted pluck of the mandolin’s strings, the bowl poised
To spill its fruit to the first pleading passer-by, the arm
Blanched and dead, who would dare hazard a guess?
5.
See the fingers hardened around the bar.
They are addicted to it.
They sense its staid length and try to forget
The ignominy of being placed on a barren table
In an orange-cloth starkness, the low
Vibrations of a mandolin’s strings
Humming through wood, the curse
Of awful green fruit that roll too easily
In their open bowl.
6.
That one day green fruit will be plucked
From the hollow of your bosom
And sucked dry before you.
This horror, inexplicable to mandolins
And their resonant emptiness, and to plaster
Arms, their cemented fists unbroken
By human touch, leaves the bowl’s howl
Always already sounding into the darkness.
7.
The table concludes that everyone in the world
Is either a mandolin, a bowl,
Green fruit, or a plaster arm.
Pulse dark rhythms in your ears.
Succumb to the lullaby
Of their speaking, know that you too perch
On a table where a cloth swaddles
And stifles you.
