Elbows off the table. Move your plate. Use your fork. Can we not talk about poop tonight? We convene around the tables that deliver us from the dirt. Pinch fuzz from gashed vinyl chairs on curved chrome legs. Pick at fleshy cigarette scars. Two-seaters shoved against the wall. Petrified dinosaurs in dark parlors Pledged every second Sunday. We gather to just sit if we can, to eat with our intimate strangers.
My memory is a faulty, cocky thing creating some blissful narrative out of spit and tape. We were under the influence, mer-people, guided by whiskey effulgence to reproduce our genes, twice. pure lunacy carried on a stabalized flight; civilized, glacial grinding of marital silence. But we're laughing now as little C screams I gotta go to the dam bathroom! landing the punchline to a beaver joke right in our laps as she exits bolstered by such an innocent lapse. I am certain that our table has eyes and remains with us due to some architectural fiat embedded in its grain.Erosion. Spills, eraser crumbs brushed and blown expose raw blonde wood wiped down to the layer of last year's glitter.
Meals born in the morning, nursed all afternoon. Meals prepared together, thrown together with joy, with expertise, as an afterthought to last night’s fight, still resonating, unresolved in minor D. The low hanging lamp over our table reveals a scene: Reaching, passing, pouring the water that keeps us alive. My family bathed in pool hall light, restores the faith I cripple over the day.
Plate the food; steam rising
Time lapse, each hour a season of coffee cups, bills and backpacks. Dull pencils and papers to sign. Exhausted bottles of wine--bulldozed every night to make way for the main event.
My son curved over the cutting board, thack-thack-thack like a knocked up metronomic ritual. He'll soon be a head and a half taller than I am, extending his long arm over my shoulder to palm 4 heavy dinner plates with a pre-adolescent mitt. ‘Scuse me Dad, he’ll say. One day he’ll gulp the thin air on which the tenuous contract between parent and child exists. He’ll never ask permission then, ever again.
Pentecostal jazz.
We thank the cook with trembling hands but the humble cook demurs, don’t thank me, I just applied the heat. So we thank the rain, the farmers and my son, once, learning to cuss, asks, What about the fucking truck drivers?
I'm impressed. But, I say, There are better ways.
He says, What about the fucking truck drivers, please?
And we unleash a litany of every natural phenomena even vaguely connected to the food on our table: Sub-atomic elemental mechanics of evolution; the reproductive zeal of our civilized ancestors; durable seeds and delicious animals so capably domesticated.
