the heart of light, the silence

I carved you a pumpkin first a year ago.



(But -- an October before,
before Before,

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
[or rather, went on in rain, into the empty café]
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

I've been cooking. Comes with the weather: thirty degrees this morning, frost and coffee steam, and the sound of the heater like the sound of the oven. I dream of bread-crust and roast duck and potato knishes. There isn't an empty tupperware left in the house. Gram, what was your trick for the cranberry sauce? Is this why I'm cooking? I miss you.

The Kitchen Grammars

The verb in a Sanscrit or Farsi
or Latin or Japanese sentence
most frequently comes last,
as if the ingredients and spices
only after collection, measure and
even preservation might get cooked.
To all these cuisines renown attaches.

It's the opening of a Celtic sentence
is a verb. And it was more fire and pot
for us very often than ingredients.
Had we not fed our severed heads on poetry
final might have been our fame's starvation.
Upholding cuisine for us are the French
to be counting in scores and called Gallic.

In English and many more, in Chinese
the verb surrounds itself nucleus-fashion
with its subjects and qualifiers.
Down every slope of the wok they go
to the spitting middle, to be sauced,
ladled, lidded, steamed, flipped back up,
becoming verbs themselves often

and the calm egg centres the meatloaf

-- Les Murray