Squash keep well because they have Kevlar rinds. It did not used to be that way, but when Kevlar was invented, lots of things changed, including squash.

Kevlar changes the way people think. More sharp-edged, bullet-precise thoughts are out there now. The addition of Kevlar to one’s attitude offers better protection from reality.  

Kevlar can float an idea for discussion. Since Kevlar thoughts are lighter and stronger than older thoughts, floating ideas sink in less deeply, carried along on surface tension.

The best way to bake a squash is to split it lengthwise with a heavy knife, scrape the seeds out with a spoon and put olive oil and spices on the saffron flesh. This works for most small-to-medium squash with barely penetrable rinds, whether acorn, butternut or delicata. They exit the oven with their fiber mush sunk against the Kevlar, which you may want to save for recycling into durable planks for your deck.

Aside from composting, there is no currently successful recycling process for older, non-Kevlar squash rinds. It’s probably best to stack them in a cool, dry place, awaiting a scientific breakthrough.    

The other day I saw an out-of-state license on a poem. The license was only on the last line. The author apparently resided in one of those states where a clean, unobstructed front-end supersedes efficient review of the theme. There was a license plate-shaped phrase on the front of the poem, but it didn’t say where the poem was from. Some licensing is necessary in poetry, I suppose. It may be good to limit slips into prose where there are a lot of potholes in personal thinking. The same goes for feelings which accumulate a layer of ice, or when the subject is dirt and there is no centerline in the dark. I looked up an actual poet in my state and asked her what poetic licensing was all about. She said it’s difficult to explain, but there are rules, as there are for other things. What they were, she couldn’t say exactly, but she used her poetic license all the time and it seemed to work. So, I said, how is it that a poet with only one license can write that she heard the house of her childhood call out to her before it was demolished? Or what about when she says the sky set itself on fire one night and refused to darken until just before sunrise? And how could she claim that the incredibly painful moment happened without warning, although everyone could see it coming? “It should have,” was all she answered.

It’s a dark reddish orange, the back of the eyeball, when you see it through the pupil.  Except for the ivory-colored optic nerve in the middle, taking sights back one after another, and the blood vessels spidering out from its center across the retina. Nowhere else in the intact body can you see bare arteries pumping up close. You look in there, in the case of somebody in a coma, to see if the nerve is swollen from brain pressure. But before you do, you check the pupil, the round black silent window over which even a conscious person has no control. It tells you by its response to your narrow beam, about where pressure might be starting and how much time is left. It reacts even when the person can’t. So tightly do we hold to light.

In Medical Humanities 35, 2, 2009.

Sometimes people lose massive amounts of themselves in a stroke, like movement of a whole body side or talking altogether. But when small arteries shut down by themselves, they dry up little villages of function. Raymond’s stroke, in his language department, took out all his English. The Ojibway he was raised with stuck. His daughter translated. We got through the  appointment. Pretty frustrating.  Like you still get the newspaper, but your mail is held at the post office and you can’t seem to get a ride over there.

In Medical Humanities 35, 2, 2009.

He was a pediatrician who delivered babies and wrote poetry in Rutherford, New Jersey. They said he wrote between patients, after patients and at night. He wrote poems like “The Red Wheelbarrow” and “Complaint.” For a while I read him late, as if we were having coffee together in the hospital cafeteria, waiting for a delivery, a lab test to be done, a patient’s family to appear. Some of it makes your neck hairs stand up to read it, a person’s life colliding with reality while you watch, feeling the reverberations. It’s what turns healthcare into medicine at 2 AM.

 

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) was an American poet and physician. His work is in the public domain.

To read “The Red Wheelbarrow” and “Complaint,” click on these links:

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/red-wheelbarrow

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/complaint-0