SEDIMENT

SEDIMENT

Like when Murray Nightingale
brought a cow's heart to school
in a big pickle jar. His dad
owned a slaughterhouse so Murray
was always bringing parts of cows
to school. The heart was white
and the jar afloat with sediment.
In Murray's speech about the invasion
of Czechoslovakia, he said that as
the tanks rolled through the streets,
the Czechs lined the curbs
with "grims" on their faces. Or
was that Clifford Snider,
or Cy Stanway, or little Gary Weinberg?
A few years later, Mr. Joshua had us
spit into test tubes. I ask him
about the sediment on the bottom.
"That's mucus," said Mr. Joshua.
Today I find I have fewer friends
every ten minutes. They flee
my hideous crimes and what they leave behind
is that a better poet than me
would insert a really good sediment
metaphor right here. (Or, more poignantly,
here.)


27 October 2006