Shopping Together
By Robert Siegel
Additional Photos
Cardboard stars crowd the shelves,
and moons marked off a penny,
as you glide, standing on the cart,
to a touch in any direction.
We shine in a dusk of eggplants,
sleepy with a perfume of apples,
wander forests of asparagus,
drift in a green ocean
of lettuce, avocados, celery,
down an avalanche of oranges
to a wilderness of bananas–
an El Dorado of lavish aromas.
Still, beyond the parsley are berries
superfluous with juice
that break in our mouths like old sorrows,
and melons like a school of whales
shouldering a cool secret
over the edge of the world.
All the way home, bags leaning
lovesick against us,
we feed each other plums and dark cherries.
Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2006 by Robert Siegel. Reprinted from “A Pentecost of Finches: New & Selected Poems,” published in 2006 by Paraclete Press, by permission of Robert Siegel. Questions about submitting to Take Heart may be directed to Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, special consultant to the Maine poet laureate, at [email protected] or 228-8263. “Take Heart: Poems from Maine,” an anthology collecting the first two years of this column, is now available from Down East Books.
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