Bubble Tea Literary - Paul Hostovsky

Oeuvre

I have to work now, he said

and got into bed

and turned out the light.

His work was sleep—

it didn’t pay very well—

it didn’t pay at all—but it bore

fruit. And the fruit paid.

But he didn’t do it for the money.

He did it for love

of the work,

which he was good at,

the way an old cat

who can sleep anywhere

is good at it. His other

job was daydreaming,

which he did everywhere

and all the time.

So there was never a time

when he wasn’t working,

which was hard on his marriage,

which didn't survive.

But the work survived

and it won an obscure prize

that few people had heard of,

for obscure work

that even fewer understood.

Smelts

My father loved smelts.

My mother introduced him

to my grandparents

at a fancy seafood restaurant.

My father ordered smelts.

My grandfather said, “Smelts? No,

try the lobster. Try the swordfish.”

“He likes smelts,” said my mother.

He’d been married twice before.

His second divorce wasn’t final yet.

He had two daughters. My grandparents

weren’t happy about it. But they were

cooperative. Especially my grandmother.

“Let him have his smelts,” she said.

And they let my mother marry him.

Of course I didn’t know all this

until she told me many years later,

after my father died. That was when

I tried smelts for the first time. I didn’t

love them. But I love that my father loved them,

that my mother loved my father,

that my grandfather tried and failed

to dissuade him from his smelts,

tried and failed to dissuade her

from my father. I love the story

about the smelts but I can do without smelts.

The Case for Baby Talk to Animals

“Wittle Miss Paulinette is so bootiful,”

said Mr. Gordon, my high school English teacher,

as he combed her mane with his reader’s

hand. All of Mr. Gordon’s cats were named

for characters in Russian literature, Paulinette

for Turgenev’s daughter. It was a little weird,

after hearing him hold forth in our classroom

on the great Russian writers for a whole year,

to hear him now in his living room talking baby talk

to one of his cats. And what would Mary Oliver

say? We were graduating in a week, some of us

were eighteen and legal, and Mr. Gordon had

invited us into his home for wine and poetry

to celebrate. The baby talk was disconcerting,

though Paulinette exulted in it, eyes closed, purring

worshipfully in his lap. “Nothing in the forest

is cute,” I said, quoting Mary Oliver. “We are all

wild, valorous, amazing. We are, none of us, cute.”

Then I took a sip of wine, and set my wine glass down,

feeling like I’d made my case. Mr. Gordon said

he agreed with Mary Oliver, but that did not preclude

his talking to his cats in the only idiom other

than Russian (he did not speak Russian) that they

understood. And what they understood was

he loved them like his own children (he did not

have children), unconditionally, in spite of their

killing the occasional wren, titmouse, cardinal

at the feeder, which broke his heart, he said, more

than the tragic poems of Akhmatova. The cooing,

the high-pitched voice, the glissando variations

of his intonation when he spoke to them—this was

how he put into words his profound affection for them.

And if that embarrassed us, he said, it was only

because we were still too callow to understand love,

at least the kind of love great literature treats of.

Paul Hostovsky’s poems and essays appear widely online and in print. He has won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer’s Almanac, Only Poems, and the Best American Poetry blog. He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter. You can check him out on his website: paulhostovsky.com.