POETRY - Theresa Whitehill

Poetry Archives

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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