Time and Materials by Robert Hass is a great poetry book. I've been carrying it around with me for a couple weeks now, reading at random and re-reading. Some of the poems have given me ideas for some new writing exercises. One of them is to write a poem with a cucumber in it. Here's what Robert Hass did.

"Poem With a Cucumber In It"

Sometimes from this hillside just after sunset
The rim of the sky takes on a tinge
Of the palest green, like the flesh of a cucumber
When you peel it carefully.

In Crete once, in that summer,
When it was still hot at midnight,
We sat in the tavern by the water
Watching the squid boats rocking in the moonlight,
Drinking retsina and eating salads
Of cool, chopped cucumber and yogurt and a little dill.

A hint of salt, something like starch, something
Like an attar of grasses or green leaves
On the tongue is the tongue
And the cucumber
Evolving toward each other.

Since cumbersome is a word
Cumber must have been a word,
Lost to us now, and even then,
For a person feeling encumbered,
It must have felt orderly and right-minded
To stand at a sink and slice a cucumber.

If you think I am going to make
A sexual joke in this poem, you are mistaken.

In the old torment of the earth
When the fires were cooling and disposing themselves
Into granite and limestone and serpentine and shale,
It is possible to imagine that, under yellowish chemical clouds,
The molten froth, having burned long enough,
Was already dreaming of release,
And that the dream, dimly,
But with increasingly distinctness, took the form
Of water, and that it was then, still more dimly, that it imagined
The dark green skin and opal green flesh of cucumbers.