Don’t you think it would be smart if you got something to eat?
Is what I hear
in what I imagine to be the surgeon general’s voice
if Sister Ruth-Ann, who publicly scolded me
for not memorizing my multiplication tables
were the surgeon general
making a public service announcement
in my brain. In a dark, low-ceilinged bar
a pretty young woman’s skin is white as the parsnip
I chopped up for gumbo this morning. On her man’s
freckles, if you look as intently
as she is, you’ll find the lyrics from all the songs
on the best juke box in town. Neither of their eyes
are seasoned enough to pierce through the beauty
of life, to see its return-on-investment side,
which you can find at a table like mine
where for the price of a pint of beer
I’ll tell you that each of us is a business, that our bodies
are fences around industrial parks
and inside we’re manufacturing fans
that work fine for 38, or 39, or 42 years,
or forever, hard to tell from fan to fan, one
or two catch fire each year, and we conduct
studies, move goods, make decisions based on formulas
that factor in advertising expenses
and the cost of damage control, calculating
down to the cent the value of a human life,
the cost of a three-walled cubicle with no window view.
Those who purchase our goods are worth X
to be reached. The ones who will die from our faulty wiring
are worth Y in compensation. The last line of the story
problem of our life to date says that the value
of Y must always be less than X. We will sit here
drinking, it’s clear by now, till we’re drunk,
watching upstart lovers like we’ve caged them,
like they’re our parakeets, trying to convince ourselves
that the cage, like the box we never think inside of,
is outmoded thinking, that what we have here
are entrepreneurs who’ve stumbled onto something big;
this is our chance to be envied for buying stock
at the very beginning, and holding on.
| Matt Mauch |
|
levelheaded: Don’t you think it would be smart if you got something to eat?
Don’t let the boldness of Matt Mauch’s “Don’t you think it would be smart if you got something to eat?” pull a fast one on you. The poem’s speaker might not be the fast-talking, beer-gulping, confident guy he seems to be.
Moves the poem makes—its long lines, its sure-footed leaps from idea to idea, its determined range of vocabulary—puff up the chest of this speaker. We could totally see him ranting about his MasterCard, genomes, lawn gnomes, craft beer, catechism, cataclysm, and on and on! Nothing is off-limits. But a few important nuances give this speaker away as an uncertain softie looking for something or someone to hold on to.
In the case of his title, which presupposes agreement, there’s a definite smack of condescension. The speaker perceives the message in the voice of a humiliating figure of authority from his past. On top of that, this “Sister Ruth-Ann” has nabbed the role of America’s doctor—who lets us know what’s best for us!—in a surreal layering of disembodied voices.
So the poem opens with a painful memory, and our guy retreats into his head. It’s key that the voice is sensed “in [the speaker’s] brain. In a dark, low-ceilinged bar [.]” Here we get a taste of the nestling that occurs in the poem. It’s unclear whether the voice originates externally or in his brain, but this line implies the brain hosts the bar, that everything that follows happens in the bar inside his brain.
Then comes the “pretty young woman’s skin [. . .] white as the parsnip / I chopped up for gumbo this morning.” (Not white as milk, but white as parsnip!) Her skin is not compared to just any parsnip, but to the one he chopped up. What’s more, his parsnip has changed form, gone into gumbo, maybe even gone again, already enjoyed for lunch.
The speaker nestles his similes and metaphors within each other, simultaneously sure of his explanation and shy of concrete speech. “[E]ach of us is a business, [. . .] our bodies / are fences around industrial parks / and inside we’re manufacturing fans,” he says matter-of-factly. Inside (of ourselves and our fences), we’re apparently making fans—and yes, he continues to speak of them as cooling machines—but are we also hard at work making admirers? Are we sorely missing these outside of ourselves? Do we have to invent them?
He chatters on, using his unconventional logic and mathematical systems, finally watching lovers, like “they’re our parakeets,” like they’re domesticated animals. “[T]his is our chance to be envied for buying stock / at the very beginning, and holding on” he says. He’s stimulated by ownership of the birds, not by the birds themselves or the monetary success. In the end, we see him as our ornately painted matryoshka doll, unstacked to reveal what’s traditionally found at the very center—a miniature version of a larger self, needing to be handled with care.
– The Editors
