“Gift Means Poison in German” [by David Lehman]

And poisson means fish in French.

Therefore, on my first trip to Paris,

reading a menu I recalled

my cousin, now a fashionable designer,

then a survivor of Dachau, twelve years old,

a week after arrival in New York City

when Truman was President. I thought

of what she must have thought when,

for the first time, she rode on the Broadway bus

and passed one gift shop after another.

Poison itself is a funny word, a gift horse

given by deceitful Greeks: look in its mouth

and see: it sounds what it says, it seems.

For example, five years ago I walked

into the Jolly Corner grocery store

which no longer stands on 75th Street

and Columbus Avenue. A man and his wife,

ahead of me in line, were buying Camels

for him and Winstons for her when

a display case of brightly packaged junk food

next to the cash register caught his eye.

His wife said, in a tone it would take a gifted actress

years to perfect, “That stuff is poison!”

and then she stalked out of the store as though,

perhaps, the ongoing argument that defined their marriage

had taken a new, subtle turn. Tilting his head

toward the door, the man behind the counter

faced the abandoned husband and said,

She’s poison.” He said it as if he knew

and by god I thought he did: very possibly both of them

were right, I decided: and wondered what the husband

was thinking, who had suffered in silence

this perfect stranger to insult his wife.

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Author: The Best American Poetry