Let's Cook!

My lovely wife made a hearty beef stew earlier this week. I was going to bring some of the leftovers to work for lunch today (it tastes even better after a day or two) but forgot.

Ah, well. Just thinking about it makes me smile.

Here's a poem by Richard Brautigan from "The Pill Versus the Spring Hill Mine Disaster." For some reason, I believe it was written in the Fall.


The Garlic Meat Lady from

We're cooking dinner tonight.
I'm making a kind of Stonehenge
stroganoff.
Marcia is helping me. You
already know the legend
of her beauty.
I've asked her to rub garlic
on the meat. She takes
each piece of meat like a lover
and rubs it gently with garlic.
I've never seen anything like this
before. Every orifice
of the meat is explored, caressed
relentlessly with garlic.
There is a passion here that would
drive a deaf saint to learn
the violin and play Beethoven at
Stonehenge.


Note to purists: I am aware that in the original, a number of these lines are indented, which gives the poem a better rhythm. For the life of me, I cannot figure out how to make Blogger recognize the indentation. I'm sorry.

New poem

This Fall

The leaves float down and the shadows grow long in the late afternoon sunlight.
From my window I watch people in the square go slowly, noiselessly by,
as if their errands are secret.

After work, we hike to a bluff overlooking a bend in the river
on the edge of this little town. A freight train, eerily quiet, eases along the opposite bank.

We sit in the fading light, watching the river
and a lone red-tailed hawk. We’ve been here many times before,
marking the subtle changes in the landscape. Our silence
is as long as the years we’ve spent together.

We are at the center, smiling, in no
hurry.