With A Cucumber In It

Sometimes from this hillside just after sunset

The rim of the sky takes on a tinge

Of the palest green, like the flesh of a cucumber

When you peel it carefully.

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In Crete once, in the summer,

When it was still hot at midnight,

We sat in a taverna by the water

Watching the squid boats rocking in the moonlight,

Drinking retsina and eating salads

Of cool, chopped cucumber and yogurt and a little dill.

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A hint of salt, something like starch, something

Like an attar of grasses or green leaves

On the tongue is the tongue

And the cucumber

Evolving toward each other.

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Since cucumber is a word,

Cumber must have been a word,

Lost to us now, and even then,

For a person feeling encumbered,

It must have felt orderly and right-minded

To stand at a sink and slice a cucumber.

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If you think I am going to make

A sexual joke in this poem, you are mistaken.

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In the old torment of the earth

When the fires were cooling and disposing themselves

Into granite and limestone and serpentine and shale,

It is possible to imagine that, under yellowish chemical clouds,

The molten froth, having burned long enough,

Was already dreaming of release,

And that the dream, dimly

But with increasingly distinctness, took the form

Of water, and that it was then, still more dimly, that it imagined

The dark green skin and opal green flesh of cucumbers.