Fall Equinox 2001 Poem
BECAUSE CULTURE IS ALWAYS URGENT
A Fable for Alice
on the event of the 30th birthday of Chez Panisse
There was, once upon a time, a little child.
She was very small
and liked apples specially cored
and she hungered as she grew,
was lonely at times
and wondered about the courses of rivers.
This girl had a habit for
beautiful things and caught
their wave through her flesh and grew
to feed enormous and catastrophic
hungers and always,
behind each singular beauty, each transformation
through the elect of butter, magnified
by pastry, translucent with the news
from Laos, the requiem from Mars, the rejoicing
in South Africa of each ripe berry, each crumbled
and glossy crust of nutty wheat there existed, there
inhabited a sadness. The more complete
the meal, the more urgent
the grief, until she knew and taught
and patted dough firmly and passed it into the
oven and over the cloth and let the butter
instruct her, melt her, set it down on a table
marked out for death dealing and said
No. All her no’s. All her moist pleasure, all her
reasons educated and every friend
with fertile mind and laughter made
the choice to ingest this good no, this surprising
and obvious and fundamental
nourishment. How many nights passed
while they repaired their clumsy
ignorance, discovering the sweet
insouciance of the mandarin
orange when it’s out on its first date with chocolate,
the brittle tongue of the escarole humbled
by warm vinaigrette, the candor of potatoes,
and the voluptuous certainty that is the peach.
Through a generation of seasons and rains
drifting down soft over Berkeley, the street
scented with the aroma of bread oven,
she diabolically and subversively insisted
on the complete pleasure of the adored
earth. Each meal a metabolic
rescue and a healing. Underneath the velvet
tent that cream makes of an egg yolk
has passed great certainties
and creations, recipes and first days of school,
death, bouquets, marriages, paying homage
to nativities and shifts in power, and sometimes just
tumbles into the grass from out of the tree.
Every day now, there is born a child, small,
who likes the beauty of the things
of the earth, who gnaws at her own fingers
and is curious about their salty flavor, hungry,
mortal, grandmother of us all.
Copyright ©2001 Theresa Whitehill, all rights reserved
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