Hard, green. Ripened, fragile. Spiced cling. Breyers All Natural. Coffee cake, Jell-O, cobbler, preserves. In watercolor with flowers, birds. Long-life emblem, acidic-sweet. Name of every downtown street. More Winn-Dixie than Samarkand. License plate, tollbooth scan. Tiny carvings in tiny pits— Buddhas, houses, forests, fish— high artistic economy. Flesh has a price. Stones are free.
What Sparks Poetry: Charles Baxter on Theodore Roethke's "The Meadow Mouse" "When a poem begins to pile up the similes, comparing an object to multiple other objects, there’s going to be trouble. Multiple similes signify instability. An emotional shift is likely to take place, a disappearance or a metamorphosis. What we get in the second part of 'The Meadow Mouse' is a disappearance."
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