Additional Poems

Dissecting an Orange
  Even More Advice for a Young Poet                 

Consider orange peels tonight.
Focus on your six imperfect trapezoids,
two wheels of cut-off ends. The under skin of lacey white
is edible, pick off  the strings. Avoid 

the heart, a tasteless pith like twist of paper towel.
Inside the tiny ovoid cylinders,
flesh quivers, waits. Don’t muse aloud
on Orange as Obvious Metaphor.

Check out the color, scent, the feel and taste
of juice that coats your hands, your smile,
your Sunday shirt. Oranges kill a cold with haste
and keep you from starvation for a while. 

Play with details. Do more than just describe.
Cut excess words—but keep essential adjectives this time.
What philosophic value to the exercise? Divine. (A modifier or imperative?) Ditch rhyme. 

Next, eat the orange. What’s left? Fling
detritus in the compost bin atop the weeds
for possum and raccoon. Come spring,
the mulch will fertilize five sprouting ivory seeds.

Now wash.

[Comstock Review, Spring 2007, vol. 21, number 01; Real Toads, Black Buzzard Press, copyright 2008 Elisavietta Ritchie

Additional Advice for a Young Poet

“A writer has nothing to teach and everything to learn, at all times.”   Albert Camus

1.
Only one paper napkin
for those six empty minutes?
Cover it with a poem.  

Wipe your face
on the other side.
Between the splotches: write. 

2.
Lose your pen?
Try a pencil. When this
breaks, wears out,

charcoal till you're black
as the burnt stick
worn to smudge. 

Write with ash
on the sea.
Write on grass, 

red ink on flames,
blue on the sky,
white on snow. 

When all implements
disappear,
use your blood.

 [Confrontation 2006; Real Toads, Black Buzzard Press Chapbook Series, copyright 2008 Elisavietta Ritchie]

Ito Jakuchu artist b. 1716, Kyoto   

I imagine him a boy in his father’s market:
he rearranges radishes, those long and white
as albino carrots with fat scarlet tubers,
in patterns like stones in temple courtyards, 

piles melons high as mountains beyond the stalls,
polishes squashes, loquats and ginger,
shakes rain from bouquets of green onions.
 

His small fingers stroke the shitakes’ gills
so lightly they leave no mark but
come away fragrant with rotting oak. 

His father cannot trust him to guard the poultry: he might unhinge bamboo cages to free ducks.

He releases roosters into the snow, scatters
good grain so they stay pecking there
long enough for him to sketch tail plumes
darkgreen fire, manes iridescent bronze,
proud heads with rubbery wattles.

In lulls between serving housewives with plums,
trading clam diggers spinach for seaweed,
and bartering rice for salt with farmers, 

he draws with swiped charcoal lumps chrysanthemums on the sign boards,
swirls, birds and bamboo on the banners, 

prefiguring colors on rice paper, silk
edged with brocade, scrolls so precious
temple priests hide them away from the eyes
of peasants, fishermen, vendors of juice. 

He would understand why I apologize
to the tomato before my knife slices,
caress the tawny hen while I wait
for the stewpot to boil.

[Ascent 1991; Real Toads, Black Buzzard Press, copyright 2008 Elisavietta Ritchie; ]

Bedtime Stories 

Begin with simple themes:
A milkmaid on her way to the stream
stumbles on a gold brooch.  A princess
stabs her finger on a quill. 

In the presence of his ministers
a king scratches mosquito bites,
a horse breaks from his stall,
charges over enemy terrain. 

From then on, kingdoms crash,
winds howl down castle chimneys,
vipers emerge from the bath house,
there's a drop in agricultural statistics. 

Or a tadpole swallows the brooch
without further metamorphosis,
the princess completes
her Ph.D. in herpetology, 

the king goes fishing, the caught pike
plea bargains but ends up
in the bouillabaisse anyway,
and the king chokes on the brooch. 

Suppose the milkmaid reaches the stream
for an assignation with the king,
but trips on the corpse of a cow, flees
and drops their baby into the marsh 

where the gardener discovers and raises him
knowing when to prune a forsythia,
and the lad landscapes the palace, unaware
of royal genes but sensitive to mosquitoes. 

However it starts, how to control it,
and why, or why not.  Sunday mornings
in bed are especially fertile.
There's no telling what next.

[originally published in The American Scholar copyright 1991 by the Phi Beta Kappa Society; reprinted in A Wound-Up Cat and Other Bedtime Stories; The Arc of the Storm, Signal Books, copyright 1998 Elisavietta Ritchie; and Real Toads, Black Buzzard Press, copyright 2008 Elisavietta Ritchie]