Excerpt from the book The New Year of Yellow
Thataboy
I got fat.
I don’t know how it happened.
I opened my pants one day
and a whole mess of stuff fell out.
One day my jowls were zeppelins and my hands floated to the ceiling.
I have enjoyed myself all the way to this fat spot—steaks and onions,
platters of shrimp in a nice cocktail,
some twenty-four thousand raviolis in fra diavlo.
What did it say about the world, my fat?
The guy down the block looked at me and said, only in America.
Goddamn right, I replied, go Bulldogs.
It was another in a slew of exhibitions that I had learned to put on
to keep myself from feeling slim.
When my buddy Mike called from the car-phone
he told me he was headed down the road for a couple of cheeseburgers at McDonalds.
Thataboy.
We’ve always been on the same page like that.
Americans with a taste for a rack of ribs when the goings get tough
and somewhere out there in the green pastures
our mothers are feeling the hurt of another herd of violent men.
It’s a thought, you know, that we kept ourselves from inheriting the rage of our fathers
by dipping into the Hollandaise.
That’s what I’ll name my son to keep him from destroying the women
that he will take to dances.
I’ll name him Hollandaise.
Hollandaise, go do your homework.
Hollandaise, go talk to your mother.
I got a ways to go before that.
Tonight it’s biscuits and gravy with a side of pork the Iowa farmer sent
from the middle of Iowa
just to make sure we get our USDA stamp of approval
on getting big.
Surf Buddha
There is a sandalwood Buddha on the desk that has my stomach
and I don’t suppose to call myself a Buddha
or even pretend to know much about Buddhist whirlings
but Rachel gave me the thing and it’s got my belly
the one my father has got
and the one his father had
and I know this bulge the way I know my name,
and can’t believe I’ve become the language of fat
that the boys in my family have kept quiet.
So I encourage my stomach out into the world,
rub it on a daily basis and think
that if I ever become a religious man
there would be god and glory to find there,
my rib cage distended,
my love of ice cream as sweet as my love of Rachel
who put the Buddha in my palm a month after we met and said, have this,
and I said, I already have this,
my hands in motion around my belly button and then today
noticed for the first time that the little bastard has got some serious nipples on him,
thank god, and breasts too,
he’s the perfect kind of godlike statuette
even if I am a Jew
but the days have been glorious and people die in truck crashes
and men beat their wives and flowers bloom purple
and the cardinal I’ve named Jack always comes around my way at this time,
4:40 in Baldwin on the Island,
Wes Montgomery on the Sony
and I don’t know if it’s his song Cariba or the wind on my swollen toes
that makes me pick up the little guy, stick him in my mouth,
swirl him around between teeth and cheek,
place him on the edge of my tongue and let him surf there,
through the neighborhood of my white heat,
on the curl of my pink waves.
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