Take a Reese’s peanut-butter cup out
of the pack into the palm of your hand.
Peel the wrapper’s pleats from the disc.
I haven’t done that in a while but remember
the feel of it in my fingers. Pleats of the cup
same as the paper’s. Similarly a modern
poem, Douglas’s Behavior of Fish
in an Egyptian Tea Garden is felt. You hear
and feel it, on the page see lines, in your
mind the girl in the tea shop, the men,
a captain on leave and others the poet gives
fish details. The Reese cup/ Douglas poem
same is both are felt, the former with fingers
the latter throughout the body. Imagine,
some people can’t feel the wrapper’s pleats,
severely impaired who can’t physically feel
but do breathe. Years ago, near Monroe,
Louisiana a lawyer in a boat on a lake
was struck and killed by lightning the day
before he was to defend a man accused
of murder. I wonder if the lawyer felt a jolt,
what a person struck like that feels. I hope
I never find out. The alleged murderer
what did he feel, and his victim, that day
alone in a storage unit? Well, jurors found
him innocent, two years later, allegedly
he killed his wife, who was also the lover
of his first victim. Again, declared innocent,
able to walk into a tea shop, go out
on a boat, take a Reese’s cup
from a wrapper and let the wrapper fall
to the ground. The big thing the Reese’s
cup and the Tea Garden poem
have in common is pleasure. Imagine
pleasure Keith Douglas got putting pen
to paper, who died in war, before his time.
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