"The Bean Eaters"
Gwendolyn Brooks

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.

Dinner is a casual affair.

Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,

Tin flatware.

Two who are Mostly Good.

Two who have lived their day,

But keep on putting on their clothes

And putting things away.

And remembering . . .

Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,

As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that

          is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths,

          tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.

Peter died in a paper tiara
cut from a book of princess paper dolls;
he loved royalty, sashes

and jewels. I don’t know,
he said, when he woke in the hospice,
I was watching the Bette Davis film festival

on Channel 57 and then—
At the wake, the tension broke
when someone guessed

the casket closed because
he was in there in a big wig
and heels, and someone said,

You know he’s always late,
he probably isn’t here yet—
he’s still fixing his makeup.

And someone said he asked for it.
Asked for it—
when all he did was go down

into the salt tide
of wanting as much as he wanted,
giving himself over so drunk

or stoned it almost didn’t matter who,
though they were beautiful,
stampeding into him in the simple,

ravishing music of their hurry.
I think heaven is perfect stasis
poised over the realms of desire,

where dreaming and waking men lie
on the grass while wet horses
roam among them, huge fragments

of the music we die into
in the body’s paradise.
Sometimes we wake not knowing

how we came to lie here,
or who has crowned us with these temporary,
precious stones. And given

the world’s perfectly turned shoulders,
the deep hollows blued by longing,
given the irreplaceable silk

of horses rippling in orchards,
fruit thundering and chiming down,
given the ordinary marvels of form

and gravity, what could he do,
what could any of us ever do
but ask for it.

I heard about a girl in town with powder-blue shoes
I knew from a storyteller (no, not from a saint)
Though I’m sure I’ve terribly misconstrued
He speaks of a girl with blue-green veins

How they reach out far beyond her fingers
Awkward tube-strings dangling in the breeze
Like jilted puppet remains following her hither
Sometimes she used them even to breathe

(And she was born like that
Loopy and never quite glad)

At home her veins grew and spread from wall to wall
Soaking up the sounds from her room to the next
I asked how she could absorb and enthrall
She said the process was really quite complex

But she wouldn’t share those lovely hues
Hoarding them all inside her space-constrained head
The blue-veined girl with powder-blue shoes
While her house turns dark and silent and dead

Draining colours from the television not too soon
When quite suddenly she burst at the seams oh
Her blood swirled with the colours of a rainbow
And pooled in the middle of the living room

(Which became a tourist attraction for days)