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An Idyll at the Local Diner

There is this place where you can get a fill
And top your tank off any time of day.
Amid the ketchup jugs upon display
Some big-boned girls will hug you, give a thrill…

It’s all just funning. Roxanne, Stephanie—
You’ll find it so when these fine ladies play
And you exchange flirtatious talk each day:
A perfect cabochon of fantasy.

There are some rules, and compliments come first—
They’ll make you coffee if you have a thirst
But not before you’ve praised their hair—its sheen,
The pictures of their babies, Opaline
Romances of the day, each petty strife…
I must advise you not to take your wife,
For she will sense the meanings of their smiles
Are like the ones of drowsing crocodiles.

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Growing Music

My flowers sing in the key of G,
__Fat melons are in F,
Which stands for fat, and obviously
__They cling to the bass clef,
While in between, green neutral things
__Seem stuck on middle Cs;
There, half-note beans climb up to snare
__Arpeggios of peas.

Forget-me-nots make pale blue dots
__Near ruffled marigolds,
While purple Hosta reigns above
__In giant, patterned folds.
Lily of the Valley hedge
__Creates a trill around the edge.

—from The Pennsylvania Review

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..

The Tree

I had a friend. I did not have him long.
We talked of how our fathers’ lives went wrong.
He took me off to see a tiny tree
We’d planted, but its new height flattened me.

I marveled at the way the tree had grown—
Its girth was five times more than I had known.
My friend smiled at my wonder—after all,
Why should a growing tree stay short and small?

A wind came up, and seemed as if it blew
Because my friend snapped shots of our embrace
(The tree’s and mine). That’s all he’d ever do.
The evening showed its rose-and-violet face.

I sent him seeds, and might have sent more things
But didn’t. Now the tree has many rings.

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Sally Cook is both a poet and a painter of magical realism. Her poems have also appeared in Blue Unicorn, First Things, Chronicles, The Formalist Portal, Light Quarterly, National Review, Pennsylvania Review, TRINACRIA, and other electronic and print journals. A six-time nominee for a Pushcart award, in 2007 Cook was featured poet in The Raintown Review. She has received several awards from the World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets, and her Best American Poetry Challenge-winning poem “As the Underworld Turns” was published in Pool. 

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13 Responses

  1. Roy Eugene Peterson

    Sally, I always enjoy your poems. I must have missed that local diner while traveling in New England. Perfect ending couplet providing both a humorous observation of what women can sense and a sincere warning. “Growing Music” is a fascinating way to consider your garden flowers as musical notes and intensifying the images that came to my mind. “The Tree” is both rewarding as a return to youth and melancholy for me, because of what might have been. The rings of time continue to be additions to a memory.

    Reply
    • Sally Cook

      All you say is what poetry offers to those who care to look. If only more had time and inclination.

      Reply
  2. C.B. Anderson

    I’m smiling, Sally. The last diner in which I had a meal was in southern Connecticut, at least a decade ago, but the most enticing item there was leftover prime rib. At the time, I was in my last year working for The Victory Garden. Sometimes, when someone wonders how old a tree might be, I quip, “Cut the damn thing down at its base and count the rings.” Thanks for singing to me today.

    Reply
    • Sally Cook

      Kip –
      Living, as I do in these Sylvan Glades, I tend t accept more and more of the improbable. For instance, I find I can now accept the idea of a gas station that sells ketchup, even though as you can see, I know it rightly belongs in a diner.

      Oh, Kip – what next?

      Reply
      • C.B. Anderson

        We are all trying to catch up, Sally. It seems the world has gotten ahead of us. As lucid (and lucent) as your words might be, you always take us to the edge of mystery, which is why I treasure your posts, and I don’t mean fenceposts.

  3. Paul A. Freeman

    I found myself reading The Idyll of the Local Diner in an American accent. Diners are such a mainstay of American films, it wasn’t hard to imagine these waitresses, and as mentioned above, a fabulous last couplet.

    Alas, musicality is not one of my fortes, though I thought the imagery around the clef inspired.

    And The Tree. Got me wondering about all the tree rings that have grown in my own life while friends have dropped away and new ones arisen.

    Thanks for three very divergent reads, Sally.

    Reply
    • Sally Cook

      Paul, I thoroughly appreciate the way you can immerse yourself in the world of a poem. Thank you!

      Reply
  4. Joseph S. Salemi

    All three are great work, as usual — but I especially like the first and the third.

    “An Idyll at the Diner” creates a perfect little picture of the small-town diner, along with the well-controlled sexiness of the waitresses, mixed with the details of coffee, family life, chit-chat, and the etiquette of proper flirtation. A lot of older men go to diners every day for breakfast, and no wonder their wives worry about it.

    “The Tree” is much more mysterious. What is the real relationship between the friend and the speaker? They are friends of long standing, to be sure, since the tree they planted as a small seedling is now well grown. Were they potential lovers? Possibly, but the line about how their fathers’ lives “went wrong” suggests difficulty or conflict. The friend then takes snapshots of the speaker hugging the tree, and the speaker adds (almost in disgust) the words “That’s all he’d ever do,” as if love-making were never part of the deal.

    The closing couplet is deeply sad. They have parted, for good. The sending of seeds may have been some final attempt to reconnect with the friend, but somehow the impetus to continue is not there. All that remains of this possible relationship is a tree getting bigger and bigger.

    This poem “Tree” accomplishes what modernism only tries to do: It takes something small and private and imbues it with deep emotional significance.

    Reply
    • Sally Cook

      Joe,I truly appreciate the way you take me seriously, while so many see only the obvious.

      I suppose this is why you are not a modernist!

      Reply
  5. Margaret Coats

    “Growing Music” is a garden where words, plants, and score co-exist! Insofar as it becomes music, it takes an organ to play–but the growing things are insistent on their identity. Organic music! A playful idea, Sally. Comparing tree growth with a personal relationship is more ominous, because the tree (if it gets beyond childhood) often outlives human beings. Your tree seems to have been planted in order to provide a measure of comparative growth, in the hope of a long friendship. But the poem is plaintive when we find the friends (or at least one of them) shocked at how the tree has grown (“its new height flattened me”). Perhaps comparing tree and friends implies how dissimilar each will turn out to be. At the end of the poem, the tree, having stayed put, has many rings, but friendship seems to have vanished with separation of the friends–or because each friend has moved in a different direction. Even the tree was not stable–it grew!. My family planted a Millenium Tree in January 2000, with 10 persons present. Now four have died, and three seem unlikely to return, while the tree overwhelms and overshadows the space where the group photograph was taken. “The Tree” is a meditative poem on many levels.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      The Spanish have a wonderful expression about what one should do to have a fulfilled and meaningful life: “Plantar un arbol, tener un hijo, escribir un libro.” It means “To plant a tree, to have a son, to write a book.” We learned it in school to help remember the three infinitive endings in Spanish: –ar, –er, and –ir.

      Reply
  6. Susan Jarvis Bryant

    Dear Sally, I’ve always admired the way you paint with words and the images you create in “An Idyll at the Local Diner” (great title) treat the reader to a living, breathing experience at a diner with a rosy persona that hides the danger rippling just beneath the surface. Such are the power of your words, Mike’s having breakfast, lunch, and dinner at home for the foreseeable future.

    I love “Growing Music” – how clever to hear the note of every bursting, garden wonder. A song always plays within my heart when I gaze upon earth’s gifts. You have managed to capture that song in a poem that exudes a mellifluous magic that I can only aspire to. Beautiful!

    “The Tree” with its tangible sadness has left my mind pondering its mysteries and my heart aching for what might have been. I’m wondering whether those symbolic rings speak of an eternity that reaches beyond the here and now… but that’s because I love happy endings. Sally, thank you for this trio of poetic treats… they’re superb!

    Reply
  7. Sally Cook

    Margaret, Susan and Joe –

    The three of you combined have given me so much to think about I fear I must lapse into the poetic! I will be working on that!

    Reply

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