Duck Soup

Didi asked that I post an audio of this very odd poem. This was written in response to one of her challenges: write a poem using all of the following impossible phrases ...  I've done this before, with some success. This one, I think, is less successful -- but still, here it is:

MP3 File

I'm making duck soup, as the year
falls toward the dark. We shall eat it
as we watch the light come up in

the morning. We are contemplating
the confinement of song birds. Can
canaries and Java sparrows live kindly

together in the same cage? Green
onions, root ginger, winter melon. He
looked so calm, so not beaten down,

in his Chicago Overcoat, there in the
Fleet Street Family Mortuary. I had known
he was a lunger, but not so near. . . He

told me he was behind the eight ball.
Chicken stock. Arrow root. All those
orphan papers posted on the board.

Who will bother with them now? He had
to have the bees. Five hives in the middle
of town. Peel and chop the ginger. Slice

the winter melon. He had the oddest quirks
with words, especially words for women: long,
long getaway sticks; great nippers; man, she

snaps my cap, but I can't carry the vigorish.
They're ringers, all of them, he'd say, wanting
to ring my bell; wanting my mazuma. He loved

duck soup, loved the way the duck came last,
after the chopping and peeling; after the salt,
the monosodium glutamate; after the shao hsing

wine or dry sherry. The clearness of it. The hot
and soft, the sweet and salt and dryness of it.
The rich and stringy empty body of the duck.

UPDATED to add title and my name, as requested; and also an MP3 file. The middle of an insomniac night is no time to do things like this.

Comments

[Sour Duck]

Fantastic poem, *loved* the way you read it. Very very good on its own but the audio file provides that extra thrill. Well done.

It's not a big deal (? or maybe it is, to a poet, I don't know...) but the nouns in this line were switched:

"canaries and Java sparrows live kindly"

(You read "Java sparrows and canaries".)

Lovely. Going to listen to again.

[SB]

I'm glad you liked it -- I keep intending to add more audio, and will make it a New Year's resolution.

& yes, it does matter -- the way I read it is better, for sound.

[Didi]

I need you to record the other one too.

d.