You can tell by the way he slices the cantaloupe

he is harmless, camera’d

in a muffled parliament of cantaloupe-motions.

For every doubt a speech.

He plans to quarter it and quarter the quarters.

The knife first rehearses

a meridian, then the equator,

then mid-cut tilts

and leaves a tatter on one half’s rim.

You can tell he thinks about

what thought is bad at. You can see

that by comparison a chimp would appear,

within its limitations, deft, while the man

with no limitations with respect to principles of melon-slicing

does not. You can tell

he withholds himself from cantaloupe,

as if frightened they will go extinct and take

costs sunk in the skill of slicing them, and further tell

it will be the same next time, him approaching

the fruit as though newly, wondering if it had

a stone in it, or pith and segments,

or required coring, or stank when punctured,

or would show pleasing shapes in section.

He switches grip,

placing his palm over the fat edge of the blade

because a sock puppet has squeaked,

Safety first.

The rinds parted from the sixteenths

are more or less a waste of flesh, according as thrift

argued with intemperance. You can tell

the impending chunks will be publicly homely, not those

of the cruise ship buffet where the night-shift Neopolitan

surpasses himself with flutes and scallops.

You can tell right off a mind unquiet

and at once absent, now remembering

J. at seventeen,

something out of a Kenyan Vermeer,

smiling elfinly as she sliced the cantaloupe.

You could tell by the way she sliced the cantaloupe

the way one slices a cantaloupe would tell a lot.

He draws the knife

along each inside edge to shave the pulp and seedmatter,

varying pressure, speed, and angle of attack

like a deaf man bowing a cello.

Stutters mark the inner faces. He slices

the slices radially into chunks, and varies

the spacing between the cuts from equal angles,

which makes the pieces too big at the center,

to equal volumes, which makes them too long at the poles.

You can tell, as he squeezes a lime-half over the pile

and steps back to admire his freehanded

benighted by-committee cantaloupe-justice,

he cannot be the children’s hockey coach

or run for office, the erratic hexes him, he

circulates sometimes fogged and twitching in his house,

not wishing you could not tell,

exactly, but wanting out.