Sardines.

Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

--Frank O'Hara (1971)

Our evenings are typically lackluster. The day of work is so demanding that come time to be home together, we fall apart on the couch and pretend the next day won’t arrive.

I’ve had the flu for three days, homebound. The TV and I have reaffirmed the relationship we developed twenty-some-odd years ago, the warm hum keeping me secure and entertained. Cable has become an outlet almost as strong as alcohol. I can scroll ahead, remind myself of programming, play the field. Watching garbage that quiets my brain and makes time pass quickly (which isn't easy when you can't breathe, cough or eat).

Stuck on the couch, the dog laying across my lap, I came across How Its Made on the Discovery Channel. Sardines! They were going to show how they packed sardines. I exclaimed this to the boy across the room and he actually had a bit of excitement, too.

Yet as we watched we were thoroughly let down. Why were they so big? No, I can't tell which have been scaled. How could they cook them with the cans open? What was that red sauce? I began to fill in the gaps with personal story telling, my experience with sardines.

It only created more gaps. When was it that I bought cans of sardines and shredded them on salads? I remember where I lived, with whom I lived, but not what had inspired such an unlikely purchase and creation. Toted in my lunch to work like a napalm bomb in reusable plastic containers.

Like many of the stories I open my mouth to mention, I realize that I no longer remember the details. The moments. The reasons. I forget that, though the boy and I have forged a great, new future together, that our past is essentially our own and alone. Memories packed like sardines, washed away with brine and full of sharp bones of reality.