The unassuming eye . . .

 

Continued from Len Krisak's review of Lines of Flight in the April, 2012 issue of First Things:

The sensibility at work in Lines of Flight can morph from the brutally honest to the refined and back again for a mordant closing joke. In "Fatuity," the speaker carries on a silent monologue in the supermarket check-out line, imagining what might best be said to the slim woman she fears is judging her (and finding her wanting) for the junk food piled in the speaker's cart:

. . . Before I wheeled my week's supply

of relish out into the parking lot,

I whispered, Lady, this is all I've got.

Just so; the justification of "a lifetime lean/and hard" — if only the censorious woman had looked on her "with the scanner's unassuming eye." Note the puns on "relish" and "unassuming."

Here's "Fatuity" in its entirety:

Fatuity

She stood behind me in the check-out queue

last Saturday. She mentally weighed in

on items in my shopping cart. I knew

her thoughts: It's no small wonder she's not thin

like me. Look at that junk food - cookies, chips,

that pint of Häagen-Dazs, those salted nuts . . .

She sized me up and down from head to hips

and measured both our budgets and our butts.

Clairvoyant she was not. Had she but seen

as with the scanner's unassuming eye,

she might have figured out a lifetime lean

and hard. Before I wheeled my week's supply

of relish out into the parking lot,

I whispered, Lady, this is all I've got.

 (from Lines of Flight, page 34)