Woke this morning to clouds

again

Didn't get excited until I put on my glasses
and saw the snow flurries. Cloudy and snow
flurries I can do. Would really like accumulation.
We haven't had any this winter.

So, in a happier mood, I decided to search
through the fridge for leftovers to use in this
morning's breakfast (I hate wasting food
and no one here eats leftovers except me
unless I cleverly sneak them into something).

I found:

a baked potato
1/2 red pepper
roasted asparagus

And I had other things, so I

diced the potato
chopped some scallions
sliced fresh garlic into thick pieces
chopped the red pepper
chopped fresh cilantro (fresh is the only way
to ever have cilantro)

I added all that to some olive oil and cooked it until
the potatoes were browning and the garlic was soft
but not overly cooked. It still had that wonderful bite
to it.

then, I

beat up (I'm so mean and testy some days) 5 brown organic eggs
chopped the leftover asparagus into small pieces
chopped more scallions and cilantro
grated some provolone

So, I had scambled eggs with all that yummy stuff in them
Oh yes, fresh ground black pepper and a bit of sea salt too.

I even added a touch of cinnamon to my coffee and some
Frangelico hazelnut liqueur.

All because of a few snowflakes. Which makes me think of
something Leonard Cohen said on a documentary
I watched the other night. He said:

Every time you grab at love, you will lose
a snowflake of your memory.

Alas, the sun has come out and the snow has stopped.
Well, if I can't have the snow, the sun will do just fine.
Been too grey here lately, as it always is here in winter.

*******************************************

Organic eggs, fresh herbs, few processed foods.
I eat healthy, but I am thinking about a comment
I made to a friend of mine who also ate very healthy,
nearly all organic or homegrown food. It would amaze
me when she would lash out at me for drinking a diet
coke. She'd tell me all the awful stuff in a diet coke
and how dangerous it was to drink many of them
and so on. And she'd eat all that healthy food
but she'd:

snort coke occasionally
smoke pot when she could get it
drink whiskey fairly often
drink beer (about a six pack) nightly
trash her lungs with unfiltered camel cigarettes
do some mushrooms if someone had any

Here she was, this tiny little thing, all of
100 pounds soaking wet at 5' 2".
Never gained any weight drinking all that beer.
Stayed relatively healthy despite a few colds
from all the cigs (at least 2 packs a day).

Maybe the healthy eating helps balance out some
things. I just know I didn't like the diet coke
lectures. The skillet calling the pot black
kind of thing, or is that the pot
calling the kettle black or is it the kettle
calling the pot black? I'm not very good at cliches--I have
a knack for turning them all around or leaving
out key words--though I have been accused
(years ago on Melic) of using some cliched words in my poems
now and again, so I must know something about them.

Anyway, I don't know what she's doing these
days. She left me. Like people often do.
I, who loved her so and was there for her
in so many desperate hours. She found
someone else to wear my shoes.

Yes, we are all expendable. I know. I am finding
that out more and more each day.

***************************************

Here's to food!


Osso Buco

I love the sound of the bone against the plate
and the fortress-like look of it
lying before me in a moat of risotto,
the meat soft as the leg of an angel
who has lived a purely airborne existence.
And best of all, the secret marrow,
the invaded privacy of the animal
prized out with a knife and swallowed down
with cold, exhilarating wine.

I am swaying now in the hour after dinner,
a citizen tilted back on his chair,
a creature with a full stomach--
something you don't hear much about in poetry,
that sanctuary of hunger and deprivation.
You know: the driving rain, the boots by the door,
small birds searching for berries in winter.

But tonight, the lion of contentment
has placed a warm, heavy paw on my chest,
and I can only close my eyes and listen
to the drums of woe throbbing in the distance
and the sound of my wife's laughter
on the telephone in the next room,
the woman who cooked the savory osso buco,
who pointed to show the butcher the ones she wanted.
She who talks to her faraway friend
while I linger here at the table
with a hot, companionable cup of tea,
feeling like one of the friendly natives,
a reliable guide, maybe even the chief's favorite son.

Somewhere a man is crawling up a rocky hillside
on bleeding knees and palms, an Irish penitent
carrying the stone of the world in his stomach;
and elsewhere people of all nations stare
at one another across a long, empty table.

But here, the candles give off their warm glow,
the same light that Shakespeare and Izaac Walton wrote by,
the light that lit and shadowed the faces of history.
Only now it plays on the blue plates,
the crumpled napkins, the crossed knife and fork.

In a while, one of us will go up to bed
and the other one will follow.
Then we will slip below the surface of the night
into miles of water, drifting down and down
to the dark, soundless bottom
until the weight of dreams pulls us lower still,
below the shale and layered rock,
beneath the strata of hunger and pleasure,
into the broken bones of the earth itself,
into the marrow of the only place we know.

Billy Collins