Pink
In China I remembered you only once:
the restaurant's speciality, chosen
from a braid of live varieties,
spiraled to the floor while the waiter
flayed it with a knife flicked
from his wrist. The snake made your initial
over and over the black tile.
What pain? Love's all touch
was the ideogram it made as it crossed
the hot stones to the table.
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Author's Note
I wrote this after my husband returned from a gig as assistant director working with Lindsay Anderson who directed a movie about the first rock and roll band to visit China--WHAM, in fact. Then I waited nearly six years to figure out what the last line was.
Originally published in THE NEW YORKER, October 30, 1989.
Other stories by Terese Svoboda
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Ouch!
Very good!!!!!!!!
I'm glad you found the last line. This is a stunning poem. The motion here is very powerful. Wonderful.
Fabulous poem
Great imagery, this.
Great, great poem. Just beautiful.
You give just enough, and then back off. You let us do some work. This, for me, is the embodiment of what is fun about good poetry.
Love the sparseness of this piece, so I gree with Katrina. great word choices and a beautiful tone. Well done.
"what is fun about good poetry."
Fun?! I've got a skinless snake slithering around in my mind!
Nobody's hungry?
Taste like chicken?
t: worth the wait.
let's eat
Bam!What a gift. Loved this so very much. Like a perfectly rendered brushstroke on rice paper.
So much is said here in just a few lines. The title is especially striking to me and "love's all touch"
Great poem. I can't do the math to figure if Lindsay Anderson could have seen it but I'm sure he would have liked it. Who wouldn't? It writhes.
Wow, this is beautiful...
Six years of waiting for a line seems only too natural when the color pink is at stake as well as other unnamed entities and mysteries.
Marcus gets a finder's fee for finding this poem. See Marc Vincenz or Jeff Davis for fee. I watched and admired your AWP reading from March. Here is probably no place to note it, but I want to see a march of women in cities around the U.S. wearing pink burkas. I want to see out the pink burka without ourselves being able to see in others' burkas. Women only. Women only women. I do not want to carry up under a pink tent burka but rather under a private or personal burka or burka of one's own. *
Whoa. The image is very powerful. Ann Bogle came onto it through Marcus S. I came to it through Ann. *
So glad you like it!