Ben Berman 

Parallel Parking

Poetry is the vehicle by which we hope,
nearly, to arrive at reality
                        ----Donald Revell

Not that I’ve curbed my desire to roam
but I love these spaces where there’s no room

for error – easing into a tight fit,
angling my way to alignment.

I used to fear the closure of arrivals,
feared they would lull my drive into drivel,

dull the great mysteries into corralled
correlations. Then came parallels

teaming and teeming, duality
in the dailyness, a reality

of routine tasks and transcendence. Long days,
narrow streets and this delightful daze

of circling, pacing, searching for gaps,
watching the ordinary structures collapse.

Pluots

Every time the world grows stale with shelf
life and the perfectly bland meaty flesh

of summer fruit, I find sweetness comes
in the least likely of places – half plum,

half apricot – heaped up in a pyramid
at this Chinese Market, a perfect hybrid

of possibility and better halves.
For days, I have been trying to graft

the present with the past. But not until
I wandered here, to this worldly and local

aisle, did I find some way to unify
the visions of the outer and inner eye,

to tear into this tightly fused fruit –
the best of two worlds, drippingly sweet.