Raspberry Rhubarb Pie
Ann has just taken one of her famous pies from the oven, and the crust has separated all around the perimeter so that the hot filling bubbles up, like lava from a Hawaiian volcano. It is very hot. The crust of the pie floats on the hot filling the way the earth's surface floats on its core of molten magma. Perhaps the center of the earth is hot raspberry-rhubarb filling, but you can't have any, it is much too hot. You are going to have to wait a very long time before you can have any.
Time Marches On
How quickly the days are passing, “Time passes,” people say. As if time were a kidney stone, as if it were a freight train or a parade. Crazy Days, Wrong Days in Wright, Rutabaga Days, Duck Days, Red Flannel Days. Gone the Black Fly Festival, the Eelpout Festival, Finn Fest, the Carnivore's Ball, the Five-Mile-Long Rummage Sale; all have passed. What has passed is forever lost. Modern Dance on the Bridge Abutment, The Hardanger Fiddle Association of America Meeting, the Polka Mass, “O, lost and by the wind grieved…” The Inline Skate Marathon, the Jet Ski Grand Prix… What is past is as though it never was. The Battle of the Bands, the Polar Bear Plunge, the Monster Truck Challenge, the Poetry Slam. …. But you came specifically to see the “Barbie Doll Drill Team, Drum and Bugle Corp.” And perhaps that's them coming now…. No, it's the Nashwauk-Keewatin High School Marching Band. It's a long parade. You shiver a bit in the chilly east wind. It's getting late and it occurs to you that you may never get back to work.
Mystic
Here in Mystic they have a nineteenth century seaport, actual buildings from the time, there's a cooperage, a clam shack, a sail loft, a shipyard with privy, tall ships… The inhabitants fished and hunted whales, bought and sold things, ate lobsters and drank beer, staggered off the end of wharf and drowned. This is the way it was, more or less. Some of these buildings were brought in from other towns. So wasn't exactly like this. The people in this village are actors playing the parts of townspeople and they don't really live here, they go home when their shift is done and watch TV and eat fishsticks. No one knows exactly how it was, but something happened here, and nothing can be done about it now.
After spending forty or more winters in Duluth, MN, Louis Jenkins now runs away when snow begins to fall, to Tucson, AZ where he continues to write prose poems, despite good advice. He is also working with Mark Rylance, actor and former director of the Globe Theatre, London, on a stage production titled Nice Fish! based on Jenkins poems. His most recent book is Before You Know It: Prose Poems 1970-2005 (2009) all published by Will o' the Wisp Books.