Enough

[rejectomorph]

Because of supermarket sales peculiarly arranged, over the last few weeks I have come to have a freezer full of frozen food. I always thought my refrigerator disproportionate in its accommodations for frozen foods, and I had several plastic, half gallon milk jugs filled with frozen water to take up the extra space, but gradually I've removed most of those jugs and replaced them with various comestibles. Now I'm inclined when I look in the freezer to mutter Good God under my breath and close the door. All that frozen food is an intimidating sight, to be sure.

It is now an undeniable fact that I have enough frozen peas to last half a year, or to assuage the pain of any number of injuries I might suffer simultaneously should a package of fish fingers fall to the floor and I, before I can retrieve it, step on it, slip, and fall myself. The collection of ice cream and ice cream novelties has reached a level that could induce an epidemic of diabetes among the town's children. This is what my life has come to. I horde frozen burritos without noticing what has happened until it is too late. How can there ever be enough salsa?




Sunday Verse

Vanishing Point

by Lawrence Raab


You're walking down a road
which someone has drawn to illustrate
the idea of perspective, and you are there
to provide a sense of scale.
See how the road narrows in the distance,
becoming a point at which
everything connects, or flies apart.
That's where you're headed.
The rest of the world is a blank page
of open space. Did you really think
you were just out for an aimless stroll?
And those mountains in the horizon:
the longer you look, the more forbidding
they become, bleak and self-important,
like symbols. But of what?
The future, perhaps. Destiny. Or the opposite.
The perpetual present, the foolishness of purpose.
At evening they recede into the sky
as if they had always been the sky.
Is it a relief to know you'll never reach them?
Is there any comfort in believing
you're needed where you are?

Comments

[daisydumont.livejournal.com]

My freezer has numerous loaves of good fresh bread that I couldn't finish all by myself and so stuck up there to gather freezer frost and then go to compost. Maybe I should invest in frozen peas instead.

The poem has a bleak feel to it. I don't trust my analytical powers and usually just coast on the feeling a poem gives me. (It's no wonder my English Lit 102 teacher talked me into changing majors.)

[rejectomorph]

Even frozen peas have an expiration date, but it's usually two years from the month of their packaging.

I suppose the poem can seem bleak, being so full of uncertainty, but (for now, at least), I'm still able to answer yes to the poet's final question, so the poem brings me good cheer.

[daisydumont.livejournal.com]

"Is there any comfort in believing
you're needed where you are?"

I see what you mean. I can still believe that of myself, too.