Paul Hostovsky’s
poems appear in Poetry East, Atlanta Review, Carolina Quarterly, Shenandoah and others. He has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer's Almanac.
Paul has two new poetry chapbooks, Bird in the Hand (Grayson Books), and Dusk Outside the Braille Press (Riverstone Press). He works in Boston as an interpreter for the deaf. Visit his Website.
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Coconut
Bear with me I
want to tell you
something about
happiness
it’s hard to get at
but the thing is
I wasn’t looking
I was looking
somewhere else
when my son found it
in the fruit section
and came running
holding it out
in his small hands
asking me what
it was and could we
keep it it only
cost 99 cents
hairy and brown
hard as a rock
and something swishing
around inside
and what on earth
and where on earth
and this was happiness
this little ball
of interest beating
inside his chest
this interestedness
beaming out
from his face pleading
happiness
and because I wasn’t
happy I said
to put it back
because I didn’t want it
because we didn’t need it
and because he was happy
he started to cry
right there in aisle
five so when we
got it home we
put it in the middle
of the kitchen table
and sat on either
side of it and began
to consider how
to get inside of it
[Originally published in Spoon River Poetry Review]
Artist’s Statement
R
oethke says somewhere about revision: find the best line in the poem, then make all the other lines as good as that one. I’m trying to make my other poems as good as this one. It’s my touchstone and my milestone. It’s the first poem where I abandoned all punctuation. I’m not in the habit of doing that, but it’s the first time I gave myself permission to do it, and while it may not measure up to a W.S. Merwin poem, still it yielded some good results.
Two beats to the line—I find myself returning to this metric again and again. It seems to fit my voice. The poem tells a story, and I like a poem that tells a story. And I like a skinny poem. I think it seduces the reader with its slender body. It isn’t intimidating. It says, try me. It says, I won’t take up much of your time. It insists on enjambment but it also insists on the integrity of every line, no matter how short. In other words, when I read this poem aloud I have to pause slightly at the end of each line. Garrison Keillor read it on The Writer’s Almanac and he didn’t pause at the end of each line—he just plowed right through it, as if it were prose. I haven’t forgiven him for that.
I suppose if you want something read right, you have to read it yourself. So I usually open with it now whenever I do a poetry reading. It’s also the first of many poems I’ve written about my son, who is now six feet tall and a senior in high school. He remembers the day we brought home this coconut because (and this didn’t make it into the poem—maybe this is another poem) I ended up using a sledgehammer to break it open on the floor, and I made quite a mess of it. Oh well, I guess happiness is like that sometimes, sweet and messy and in pieces all over the kitchen floor.
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