Four Poems
Rick Benjamin
Red & Pink, 1925
Add-graphic commissioned
by Cheney Bros. Silk Manu-
Facturing Company— so art
of giving the man
what he wants al-
so means honoring
your own needs
as working artist:
taking care of the
customer selling
silk textiles, also
touching tactile
inner life at the
same time, their
lips, tongue, stay-
men zoomed in
so far down into
both the human
as well as flower.
Imagine selling it
while same time
keeping all that
richness to yrslf!
Imagine all sales
spiking; while u
& Georgia O’K
Eeffe & flower
get just
what u
wanted.
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Kin
Jump up & live again! — Martín Prechtel
Sycamore cracked open
my head but also broke
my fall, &, listen, that’s
not all: I’ve spent this
lifetime wondering why
what might kill you also
reaches out, sometimes,
to save your life, hold its
tongue while it holds
yours against going
down your throat, stops
you from seizing up.
In a
winter season once
another tree, 500 yr
old beech, got under-skin
long enough to coat my
lungs with cold, al-
most stopped me
from growing old. This
story’s been told many
​
times. Look, that
silver fir in Eugene
has my whole heart &
doesn’t really belong at
such low altitude.
Someone I now
know climbed it to top
of its canopy just to lift
out what might
eventually keep
​
it from breathing. 250 or
so years old deserves a
​
cleaning. Martín
Says, you can
​
make food; & you can
make it bland. But don’t.
Beauty isn’t like
that. It’s leaning
into the firewood &
an iron pan & a spoon
& maybe one
tortilla & just
one can of sardines you
somehow split five ways
so every one
leaves a table
​
full. My grandfather said,
fuller, because he always
felt that way
even lacking
​
any money for beauty. It’s
never too late to see it in
even one fig tree
from childhood
didn’t try to kill you, even
grew in desert dirt so hard
Its sweet fruit
felt unlikely. It
could fall & rot on ground
hot enough to simmer it
past life if you
didn’t take care,
so make it beautiful when
you remember it, even if you
didn’t usually
like or eat that
​
fruit before. Make it beautiful;
make it your sister, sister, &
bring her down
to your roots,
watch her jump up,
jump up & live again
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The Great Palestinian Cooking Show
​​
Another day a ten-year-old
Palestinian girl in Northern
Gaza (don’t say her name)
improvises joy, cooking up
most unlikely meals from
lentils contained in cans,
powdered milk, nothing
fresh of anything. She
talks about all of this,
the necessary, even
inferior substitutions,
wrong pans, firing up
through rubble. I like
it best when she finally
tastes what she has made,
closes her eyes in a
kind of culinary ec-
stacy, a leap of the
tongue, the sudden
smile on her face:
once more finding
what you can now
feel in your own mouth:
beauty even middle
of the worst of it.
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Talk-back
after & for Martín Prechtel
Ancient races, he said, on the Steppes,
never meant to be won,
just run, & not
by humans, by horses outnumbering
them two to one, & only children, 8 or
10 or 12 years old riding
their backs &
following their tracks for hours or days
whenever a race celebrating all life both
terrestrial & celestial
was required.
Even 2 year-olds know how to ride any
horse in Mongolia &, like the adults, never
confuse competition w/
celebration: how
to move simply for the joy of it, fast, w/
o/ any maps, the last one in prodding
the rest to come in faster,
​
holding back, in
order to make an entrance, dig it— They
honor the chase not who wins—one who
set the pace. These horses
know best how
to find a way, even the way. Messengers.
&, everyone, even the humans, know it.
Rick Benjamin lives on unceded Chumash land in Goleta, California, & walks on well-worn centuries’-old paths each day. He works with children as young as four, elders as old as 101, & middle-schoolers & college students in between. He has been gainfully employed on college campuses, in youth detention & assisted living facilities, public schools & many other elsewheres, & is the former state poet laureate of Rhode Island.