Allan Johnston



The Eater of Avocados

opening

The militant leaves try to disguise them
in small memos of jungle.
He is too clever; he brings ladders.
Reaching up, he finds them;
thumbs of another substance, coarse
and gangly, too awkward to twaddle.
Their freeing is easy, a twist, a technique.
With practice it comes to nothing.

As the knife easily passes
through the skin the fruit surrenders.
He opens the soft, lopsided round
to find the green sky,
a teardrop of taste
coddled in oily atmospheres
along the curved horizon:
							sunrise!
The yellow illumes the hard and pithy
redolent football seed:

the tree is waiting
to get cracking.

eating

It brings forth the first word
in the alphabet of taste.
Soft with water and southern dust,
it calls for salt and lemon;
the red ghosts of powdered chilis
flavor the syllabation:  AH!
shape of the tongue and mouth
that shy and round to the form of fruit,
a small, green, leather-cassocked monk
who advocates sensation:  VO!
the oiled variations on
a theme that gleams on chins, greens teeth,
receives these flavors speaking of
the ease of eating:  CA!
a crow's weight of fruit in trees
with spatula leafs; the spiced scent
of the orchards through which deer move:
DO!  philosopher of flavor,
Dogen, eminent Buddha,
jade or emerald, purchase of price--
rough alligator texture
of the throwaway skin.

disregarding

Round
of the green sky
thickens inside,
solidifies
with a soiled
atmosphere:

this fruit:
seed within
a planet swimming
in oil:

this then
is the secret
of the avocado:

Things to be done, things to be done, the world at large
resting as if under the too heavy necessity of change,
as if the weight of contradiction were bearing down like a
			large crack:
and then the smokiness enters the taste,
and then comes the slow loss
of softness in
these hard black fibers