THE COOK

Photo by S.P., Lahaina, Maui

For Anne

The cook started the day by smelling the plumeria flower (pink-white) from the landlord’s tree, picked one, and relaxingly breathing it in. The dream last night was inspiringly simulacra: the mind creates an exposure, like film, and the last image before closing the eyes is developed and forever becomes a memory (the moon in the window was the picture, and the words had for its sake a vivid function). Another vision came from a poem he read after cooking (recipes will follow), and it was about a day coming to an end, “the water is mostly still,” and the moisture in the air is versed to become light that are then made into stars. After swimming, the cook rests on the flat rock beside the rapids when the clear pool current runs with bubbles and when the riparian forest sheds some leaves down. The most beautiful sunset happened in Lahaina. Indigo blazing the senses, and the tall coconut tree satisfying the curved dusk on Front Street.  Mana’o radio plays on his drive back. Where is he? Where is his mind? Where is the food that loves his hands? Boiling flat beans and snow peas in salted water. Reducing the marinara spiced with charred chiles rellenos and their edible leaves. In between these tasks, reading the last pages of Dear Leader by Jin-Sung Jang and crying when the defector poet laureate from N. Korea calls his true homeland his Freedom. But his freedom is dedicated to his dead friend, a classical musician, so tender he was and this new freedom in the South will never be as sweet without him. The brown rice is cooked with raw peanuts and laced with a sprig of rosemary. Metal spoon, metal chopsticks, metal bowl (beveled texture by an artisan)— this dish of serene rice and legumes simply salted with lemon, in this bowl, in his adopted city of Seoul is where his memory is.  The past transcends, he will eat this food and be grateful, for the nostalgia can never be reclaimed. The breeze goes as near his hair as if butterflies. If he were a sane man, how else can passion live? How of poetry can survive? The cook is indigenous to it, and his naked torso is smooth. His movement is precise as his line of ingredients, but the alchemy comes from the plants that dye the braise. Dean Moriarty was the muse of Sal Paradise. In the book he wrote about his wild world that will be his greatest voice. When he turned the bend, he knew the sunrise would be full blast mode, full molten orange, its relativity directly tender as can be. How of love can break it? Of living without a staggering spirit? How could in goodness fail in word? The cook is in the kitchen, but the poet is the salt that binds all these fruits. And the chrysanthemum in his room is like light, like freedom tied to duty. He sets the table, the food, and in his chair like praying, conjures the universe in his mind and thanks her for producing the miraculous sacrifice of this beautiful meal. Mr. Jang wrote a poem about hunger. In it he said, when life was good there was corn, and when it turned worse, he could only remember the days when there was companionship. When he cooked for love.