Too Much Honey On A Spoon Poem by gershon hepner

Like too much honey on a spoon
is love you feel you do not need.
Love stolen in the afternoon
is like a garden you don’t weed
because you think that it will take
care of itself, though without honey
you’ll find that stolen love you make
in afternoons requires money.

Sweet needs cannot be satisfied,
however succulent they tasted
when you enjoyed them till they died,
but time is hardly ever wasted
with love that you’re prepared to steal
because you know you will enjoy
each moment––a dishonest deal,
but one that doesn’t tend to cloy.

Inspired by Wyatt Mason’s article on Frederick Seidel in the NYT Magazine, April 12,2009, which inspired my poem “What Thou Lovest Well”:
“Speechless — ecstatically still”: the experience Seidel’s readers have over and again with his art. His poems deliver a kind of enchantment, an enchantment that grows out of disenchantment. They are filled with what, in “Sunrise, ” he called — exclaimed in fact — “This need to look! ” The door of a boxcar filled with Jews in 1918 Russia “is slid open from the outside/Like a slowly lifted guillotine blade.” Sex with an uncommonly genteel woman is “like feeding steak to a hummingbird.” Death, when he comes for you, “sits up like a little dog and begs.” Nor are Seidel’s versions and visions of the natural world — poetry’s oldest quarry — any less novel. The rising sun bulges at “the horizon/Like too much honey in a spoon.” Moonlight is “a wave hushing on a beach.” News received by phone that someone dear has died arrives “like a tear falling in a field of snow.”

4/13/09