I have to honor the food I have with love. They're beautiful. And I can’t get any luckier. The play, Ah Wilderness!, by Eugene O'Neill, (I just finished reading it), surely had inspired me to feel this way - "Yet Ah, that Spring should vanish with the Rose!/That Youth's sweet-scented manuscript should close!" Lounging all day with the book, a storm was suddenly approaching the island with forceful wind gust smashing the curtains, so I got up and shut the windows in several rooms at risk of rain spray. And returning to reading, I got hungry. Inspecting the fridge was cooked rainbow linguine begging for a good sauce. I have salted butter, I have fresh sage. And how about the surinam cherries for contrast tart? The shrub grows in the side yard of my place and they’re edible delicious ripe when deep red. And ’tis the season! Alas, that was quick and satisfactory dinner— twirling and mopping the plate of beurre blanc in the pasta, and literally the fruits just picked, from branch to my mouth, explode c'est bon. (Simply put: melt a decent chunk of butter in a pan with the chopped herb and lightly fry the sage, and then coat the pasta liberally with the sauce, adding crushed black pepper and chili flakes, mixing them all in with a tong and letting all the aromatic emulsions absorb every strand. Transfer to a square bistro plate. Arrange the cherries on top and around as pretty as pretty can be. Eat; marry into eating.)
"They do not know the secret in the poet's heart. Food! I love the sand, and the trees, and the grass and the water and the sky, and the moon... it's all in me and I'm in it... God, it's so beautiful! We'll go to some far-off wonderful place ... somewhere out on the long trail - the trail that is always new ... [and] we'll watch the dawn come up like thunder..."
The porch screen door rattles and detritus leaves and bougainvillea flowers blow in the hallway; victuals of the biosphere make their entrance into the kitchen narrative of my home. Poetry feeds too. And I did my part before the break of day at the refuge, the morning after the rain, rebuilding the collapse wall of stones protecting the forest pool. Like in the play, hard work replaces prayers, that all is forgiven, because the mountain hears. The downstream current was strong and I slipped dropping my heavy load, there was a breach, but I didn't wash away. I was saved. It was like... I was in the belly of the poem. And I was food.
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