Kitchen Poem

 

Fotografia de Artur Pastor

I put the bacon into the pan.

It lies there, lank and perfectly relaxed.

After a few minutes, though, a marvelous transformation

starts: the bacon begins to whisper, then hiss,

sinks down, becomes transparent, bubbles and snaps

and babbles to itself, turning crinkled and brown and stiff.

Meantime, I cut up some mushrooms.

The knife blade enters the soft puffy white flesh.

What is a mushroom: a fruit? a vegetable?

Inside the cap, as half the mushroom fails away

gills and a tiny breathing space are revealed—

a secret maritime connection: earth-fish, land-anemone

alive on the ocean of the mossy forest floor.

As the mushroom slices are added to the intense heat of the pan

each one dries out and appears as a miniature kippered herring.

Now I drop in the eggs. Two circular wonders.

The clear fluid becomes white and solid

as the yolk builds its own bright dome in the snow.

Personally, I like to put a lid on it all

so the white covers the yolk entirely.

Food is where everything starts. A thin slice of cheese

melting on my tongue. And I have to

taik about salads. Water

fleshed into green crisp ragged wafers:

lettuce leaves torn up and put in a wooden bowl.

With sliced celery stalks: one piece crunching

between my teeth as I work. Tangy radish:

a red warning sign of a coat, and below that

an apparently-calm, deceptive interior. Not like a tomato

which is honestly red and juicy all the way through.

Green peppers are even more deceiving:

really you just eat the rind because that’s all there is.

To me, peppers seem a little embarrassed when they are cut open.

They have spent so much time attempting to look like an apple

that once they are exposed they try to vanish underneath

everything else in the salad.

Avocados. Warm green California memories

shipped all this way for me: a fruit

with a pudding inside, sweet, bland and mushy,

the absolute opposite of carrots

which are delicious edible wood,

staunch and starchy, each carrot disk

slipping off the knife. I pick one out to munch on: aaaaahh.

Then I put my wooden fork and spoon in

and stir the whole pile up. I pour

an oily and vinegary dressing on, slippery and

pungent with spices. Out of the water

and the ground it all comes, to my plate and my fork

and into my mouth.

I eat. Taking the planet as a whole

not very many can do that. Luck

has brought me this food, though something harsher than luck

keeps the others away from the table.

I eat and go on talking.

Others who can’t eat, or who can’t eat so much

meanwhile are thinking of something else to say.

But still I love to eat, as a person should.

This is how I know there is something wrong

with those who keep food from the poor.

I think if the vegetables controlled the world

there would be enough for all, since even a vegetable

knows its duty is to feed the earth. Something lower than that

must have its hands on things: some sickness

that decrees some people will eat and not others.

Yet food has its own revenge.

Hugo Blanco says that in Chile, under the generals,

when every form of resistance was mercilessly stopped,

the men with the guns had to allow

people to buy food and cook together

since conditions under military rule made this necessary

if many people were going to eat at all.

Now for this activity you need some sort of organization

Blanco says, and you can’t stop people talking to each other

while they’re stirring up the soup. And they don’t

Blanco says, always talk about food.

See how sneaky eating is? I think if you want to control

human beings, you really have to keep every bit of nourishment

away from them. For if someone once opens his mouth to eat,

who knows? instead of rice going in

a word might come out.

Myself, I go on eating, as I go on breathing.

But I hope these two acts are all that ties me in this life

to those men and women who for now decide who starves.

Tom Wayman