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POETRY - Theresa WhitehillReturn to Main Poetry Page | Poetry Archives |
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Fall Equinox 2001 PoemBECAUSE 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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