C.E. Chaffin

C.E. Chaffin is a Californian, and his first book is ELEMENTARY from

Mellen Press, PO Box 450, Lewiston, NY 14092. He can be reached at

stratos2@juno.com.

That Dishwasher Smell

I opened my dishwasher and smelled

the sterile-sweet smell of superheated detergent

and plastic made aromatic by high temperatures

that makes me hand-rinse my glasses before I drink

and takes me back to washing dishes at a Mexican restaurant

for $1.10 an hour, where I scraped

burned beans three inches thick

from the bottom of huge, two-handled pots.

The beans, red-skinned, white-pulped,

smelled like wet cardboard and burnt toast

when I dipped my hands in their pebbly mush

like the bowl of guts you feel on Halloween.

When I moved up to sprayer

I had to sort bus trays that reeked

of blue cheese and cigarette butts

and whiskey and wet napkins,

grease and Maraschino cherries--

almost as bad as the dishwasher smell.

I teased their garbage out

before I doused the dishes

with my high pressure nozzle,

then stacked them in the rack

that slid into the huge stainless box

where they were purified by the smell

of superheated detergent and hot rubber again.

After the last dish dried I'd mop the dregs

down the sloping concrete floor to the central drain

where lettuce scraps, fish bones,

white grease and hairs collected,

then I'd scoop it out by hand and replace the grate.

For all the garbage I handled,

it was the dishwasher smell

I could never get out of my hands,

ground in like rodeo dirt.

Poem Composed Entirely From Lines Found In A Journal

(The Iowa Reviews Summer 1996 Poetry Issue)

"In a world without hope, there is only hope"

(not T.S.

Eliot)

Between two worlds, the world in which one tells

and the world of which one tells

I feel transparent, a boy in a man's body.

I hesitate between decision and non-decision

then I fall back and shy away.

I suck the twin breasts of identity;

life and death at once both become inevitable.

How can I paint life without death?

How can I paint beauty without ugliness and pain?

If I could hold your sadness

I would give it wings...of gossamer

to lift your sorrow, as if you had asked for it.

Poetry is a vast orphanage

in which you and I are stars,

where lounge acts waste our precious time.

They seem to take on a life within one

so the dreamer looks on from outside the body.

If I tell you we were all raped,

charged by the sententious righteousness

of those who would have us damned,

you might think that's poetry--

(another article on the same page makes this observation)

Let's leave the question open.

I had always made high drama

ruins to rise from, hurts for curtain call.

We're in a dying year--

that drowning mixture of confused need,

the abyss of confusion.

No one can take that from us.

Most of these people have big plans,

careers the likes of which

I can barely imagine.

So why am I here, tell me, why?

I be mean. I be strong.

I be bad. I be wrong.

There is still a rhythm in my blood,

the slow hazy smoldering of a persistent dream.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,

the extinction of a love is like

I cannot remember what exactly,

a burst of laughter cracking the shell of innocence,

a cloud whose rain has all fallen, adrift and floating.

I like to collect and itemize things and people.

Give me a good example of a bad poem:

Women walk together

transform our tears

and our rage into action.

C.E. Chaffin