Polymer Voices
Suppose that these materials
designed for just one use could speak.
Ubiquitous, obscure, they bear a number,
surrounded by arrows that chase themselves
in triangular form, suggesting a process
we studied once and almost grasped.
Sensing how despair and loathing
have complicated our love for their utility,
they each confront us.
Polystyrene, known as Styrofoam (“#6”)
Wrapped around your purchase, I took the shocks
that would have marred your desk and table lamp
with brush-gold finish. Emerging from the cardboard,
a snow-white body guard.
Born in 1941, my creators
sought an insulator, like rubber, but I
extruded from the chamber as foam,
weightless as abstraction.
Your nails have loosened a few snowy beads of me.
They are clinging to your wrist and elbow
as you slit the tape and lift the main attraction
from the nest of my airy body.
You have moved the rest of me into a corner
for disposal. I wait there, stirred by the breath
of doors opened and closed.
Polyethylene Terephthalate or PET (“#1”)
Inviolate, sturdy, light and clear –
Clear – so that
river-green of lemon-lime
Trump-orange of the mock citruses,
rich caramel of colas reach your eyes, buyers,
and trigger memory of thirsts quenched,
of uvulas tickled by the little bubbles.
Oh, sure – I can be reincarnated,
coming back as a fleece hoody, as carpet.
But know this: I will always be myself.
Broken down in sunlight over time,
the tiniest part
of me will bear
my signature
as legible in
a halibut
as in you –
always myself:
sturdy
clear, light, and
inviolate.
Low-density polyethylene (“#4”)
What makes you scowl to see me,
thrust upward into view
by spasms of traffic wash
on the road that skirts the landfill?
Even from your car, you know I’m covered
with dust and filth. The day you tore me
from the produce roller, fingering
my edges for an opening,
I was pristine and expedient.
My clarity was sufficient then
to show each apple’s red-veined skin,
and I carried those apples home
without a bruise, though their flesh
outweighed me more than ten-fold. Now
emptied of meaning, you’d rather
I disappear. Tough luck –
In the darkness of the landfill,
my tensile strength, my weightlessness
will live to vex the child of your grandchild.
Seeing the Place
Before seeing you, I remind myself
that you have less need of us to witness
the fire of your young life, to bless
that fire, or help you tend it.
Of course, I’ll miss the boy who’d find me in the kitchen
and settle back against the opposite wall to share
the hot evidence he’d plucked from the world that day.
Today, you sit just feet from me,
but you’re somewhere else.
Your eyes bore through the family space,
clearing a place in your mind
for something not yet formed.
Closing for a parting hug,
I see your gaze pass through me –
no matter. I know what it can cost
to see the place that you alone
must make, a place that cannot wait
for anybody’s blessing to be born.
Clark Bouwman is an essayist, poet and translator whose work has appeared in Gargoyle Online, Feral, The Dreaming Machine, The Antonym, The Arts Fuse, and in the anthology Music Gigs Gone Wrong. Originally from the DC area, he and his wife moved to the San Francisco Bay area in 2018 to help with their grandchildren.