To qualify as a bento, your packed lunch must include at least one small pickle.

I just made my first bento this week, incidentally: a brownie and three strawberries. *laugh* I, too, got the maggot image from the white rice, for whatever that’s worth to you.

Misread, don’t you mean? Nothing like commenting to put on display my impoverished reading skills! Embaressment is oh so stimulating and envigorating! Any difference between dash and semicolon is entirely vague and whimsical to me. It must be astounding to you to hear the anomolous content I find in one of your poems. D’ya think it might all be due to my computer screen?

Richard – At some level, I think the wabi-sabi aesthetic is simply realism. The equation of beauty with perfection is a kind of mind-fuck IMO.

leslee – Thanks. Yeah. Though usually I’m too sleep-deprived on long bus journeys to absorb all that much. In this case, it was something I saw last Sunday, while riding with L.

Bill – It’s kind of fun to hear in such detail how a poem was read! I’m surprised it wasn’t obvious that “white on rice” modified “bodies,” though. I’d have put a semicolon, a dash, or even a period after “them” if I’d wanted to suggest that the following phrase referred to the trailer as a whole.

Rebecca – Thanks for the comment. Counter-poems always welcome! All reader reactions are interesting to me.

Did you mean to compare the former human tenants to maggots?

Not consciously, no. At the most superficial level, of course, “never feeling full” echoes the typical complaint Americans have about Chinese or Japanese food – half an hour after eating, you’re hungry again. But beyond that, I think what I was getting at with the Japanese bento imagery was the simulaneous attraction and repulsion we tend to feel toward the exotic. And as you know, rural poverty is treated as an exotic thing by a hell of a lot of folks.

But I was curious–I get an atmosphere of decay from the poem, and the last four lines make me think of maggots. Did you mean to compare the former human tenants to maggots?

(My counter-poems are often rather creepy, and frequently involve our arthropod friends.)

“A house trailer
…never feeling full.”

At some point I realized that a house trailer going down the road would have plastic wrap.

The question of what

“white as rice
growing round..”

modified was also a challenge as I first attached it to the contents of the trailer. The difficulties of that formulation promoted intense visualization of the trailer’s contents. When I got that it was the outside of the trailer was “white as rice” it was only after clambering over all the furniture, going in and out of closets and clothes till finally I got out and took a walk around the outside of the trailer. When I did that I knew for sure the trailer wasn’t moving.