About Stein’s ‘Celery’

Coiling as from a whipping. This stretch only
As contaminated as it feels in the mouth.
How soft-eyed the plural letter seethes,

Ending as it does in fertile ruins.
What a superfluity of nutrients we ought bury.
Technical now that you’ve highlighted it

As legal as a sac of injustice.
A verb in on it for us.
Nameless they go into a color.

An imprisoned nobody imaging a path to herbs.
The strongest child pinned down the end
For an edible wreath.

Never thought we could game funerals like this,
Led as we are to a loose formation of ropes.

 

Dennis Andrew S. Aguinaldo teaches the course ‘Science and Technology in Literature’ at the University of the Philippines Los Baños. Other poems have appeared in Transit, hal., The Cabinet, and {m}. He is the author of Shift of Eyes and Bukod sa maliliit na hayop, stories and poems respectively. He blogs at tekstongbopis.blogspot.com.