friday refrains · peter pereira
Friday 20 June 2008 | I like a cookie
Admittedly, I frowned aloud when I first held this book, weary of lyrical titles with both “writing” and “body” in them, weary of gritty B&W photographs of anonymous expanses of skin. And yet, if anyone is at all qualified to write poems about such things, it’s got to be Peter Pereira, who’s an MD, a GP, and an attentive annotator of physical experience, training his omnivorous eye and surgically delicate hand on himself as well as his patients. (He also has a charming blog, with literary news as well as pictures of baby robins and garden parties and so forth.) And then, after witnessing a week wherein many Californians were finally allowed to marry one another legally (even 71-year-old Lt. Sulu!)….well, I’ve had this poem stuck in my head for days, and always get a little tearful hitch in my breath at the ending.
•
TAKEN
I’ve doctored her through hip replacement,
colon cancer, stroke. She is the doting grandmother
I never had. Thinks of me as her virtuous, infallible
second son. So it’s no surprise she notices immediately
at her monthly clinic visit the new gold band on my finger.
Do you have some news to tell me? Taken off guard,
I mumble something about anniversary gifts,
fifteen years, my partner. Partner? She turns
a worried, puzzled look toward her daughter.
Did he say partner? Surely, after all these years she knew
my preference. But now she seems disappointed. Almost
disapproving. Produces a picture from her billfold
of someone she and her daughter had hoped to introduce
to unmarried me. Well, she huffs, you know
what they say, all the good ones are . . . taken.
I wince, expecting to see a hazy glamour shot
of a favorite niece or neighbor, but to my surprise
and delight, the one they had imagined for me: a man.
—Peter Pereira
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