A Poem For Sunday

“Glutton” by Frank Bidart:

Ropes of my dead
Grandmother’s unreproducible

sausage, curing for weeks

on the front porch. My mother,
thoroughly

Americanized, found them

vaguely shameful.
Now though I

taste and taste

I can’t find that
taste I so loved as a kid.

Each thing generates the Idea

of itself, the perfect thing that it
is, of course, not—

once, a pear so breathtakingly

succulent I couldn’t
breathe. I take back that

“of course.”

It’s got to be out there again,–
. . . I have tasted it.