Sudden Accelerations, 
or I Hate to Say This but …

The white-capsule, white-pink-and-black
box of Good & Plenty is 
no better or worse than the yellow-orange-
brown Reese’s butter cups wrapper.

In a circle of mint-green chairs 
each child, in turn, reads aloud 
from Around the Corner.
The book’s title seems a metaphor for fate, 
and the circle a circle of mortality.

Culture vulture that I am, I wonder 
if singer Pearl Bailey and actor Dorothy 
Dandridge knew each other. Google 
could tell, or a looker, listener
who was alive when they were alive.

In the dark of my celibate room, I rise 
and shine, thinking I moved far away
from the person I should have married,
and the person I wanted to marry moved 
far away from me.

Within these walls, Bill,
who was in lumber, passed away, and Carl,
a handwriting expert, settled. 
I wonder if either, or both, ever admired
the beauty of leopards.

The dark underbelly of humanity lies 
behind the sunny skies of filmmaker David 
Lynch’s Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive. 

One night, on a riverbank, it was still 
light outside, I rubbed red-green leaves 
from a poison ivy bush on my arms.
I wonder, have you ever bitten into tinfoil, 
say, from a gum wrapper? 

Dana was walking and fell through ice.
He got out of the freezing water, 
and to a phone booth and called his mother.
That happened after the night of Anselm
Hollo’s poetry reading. Hollo said,
“Anything can be a poem.” Dana, sitting 
next to me, said, quietly, “If it’s good.”

When musician John Coltrane did an album
with vocals, he chose Johnny Hartman, 
whose voice is as smooth as water poured
from a decanter into a glass,
and whose life was ill-fated, due to an excess
of alcohol, according to Wikipedia.

The sound of dice shaking in a cup, 
a sequence of soft clunks, is pleasant,
though I’ll be damned if I can recall
my hand shaking such a cup.

Have you ever stuck your fingers 
in a bowling ball,
or petted a mare’s mane, or been bitten 
on the back of a leg by a Wheaton
while mowing a lawn? 

Note money’s similarities: Abraham Lincoln 
on a five-dollar bill, Alexander Hamilton
on a ten. Both names start with a and end 
with n; both men died from being shot by
pistols, Lincoln from behind in a theater; 
Hamilton in a duel on a promontory 
above a river.

Have you ever sat in a garden? I haven’t,
but I weed a small garden,
shaped like a shield curved 
on one side, straight on the other,
and, at the bottom, pointed. In my garden 
red roses, a stone throw a brown milk box. 

Weeding a garden is like writing a song
or a poem. The poet Stanley Kunitz,
in Provincetown, tended a garden. 
Its array of colors and blooms 
startled passersby.

I wish I could act as well as Barbara Payton,
the femme fatale in James Cagney’s film
Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye.

Google could tell me the name of glass
with diamond patterns in it,
that you can see yourself in,
like the two glass doors of a big brown 
cadenza I saw myself in,
when I was nearer a floor than I am.

Face the invisible mirror, I tell myself.
The person I should have married 
was blond and easy to get along with;
the person I wanted to marry 
was brunette and hard to get along with.
Boxing fan that I am, I remember Emile 
Griffith and Benny Paret. Griffith, years 
after their third, fatal match in the ring, 
said, “I couldn’t get along with myself.”

On the baseball diamond, shortstop
Luis Aparicio 
tosses the ball to Nellie Fox, 
who fires it to first 
to get the out that ends the game.

Peter Mladinic‘s most recent book of poems, Maiden Rock, is available from UnCollected Press.