Everything goes
into this three-pound confessional:
oil fragrant with peanuts,
sometimes sesame, always garlic.
It can reincarnate last night’s rice
I cook down hard, until it’s evolved
into brown crunch infused
with jasmine and salt. My skillet
has gone to war, seared
steaks, downed men,
transformed flabby pork
belly into an armor of crispy
chicharrón to be dipped
in peppered vinegar or tabasco.
It has cradled so many uncarved
chickens whose caverns have housed
whole lemons sliced like cathedral
windows of sun, apple pears,
or onions like unmapped globes.
I bless the chicken
with soy sauce, coconut
vinegar and even a bit
of ginger that bites like a woman
at the peak of bliss.

This is how I get the men
to love me.

I watch them eat
in unarmed silence,
spellbound by potatoes
I’ve scalloped, then fried
in butter and shallots.
I’ve sautéed that cod
to a softness that renames
their tongues, as if eating
were a thousand
and one nights,
and they can’t move
and they wait for centuries
on their knees,
begging: Just a bit more.
Just a bit more.

What better way to spend my time now than to play
the sous-chef as my dear wife prepares this very day
yet another of her heavenly meals? Cinnamon yellow
squash soup with hints of fresh mint, a melting mellow
eggplant Parmigian’, chicken a la Francaise,
crumb apple pie. Ah, lucky me, to have been chosen
to dice the scallions and onions, peel the potatoes,
gather from our little garden parsley, basil and some thyme,
then back inside to uncork a bottle of three-star wine.

Oh, to put aside the books that keep staring up at me
clamoring to be read: a fresh translation of the Odyssey,
Dante’s Convivio, Flannery, Chesterton, and Joyce,
as well as a dozen poets, each with his or her distinctive voice
but who too often now remain unsung. And that piles of books,
each clamoring to be blurbed and praised, as by the looks
of it they no doubt deserve. But oh, that freedom just…to be.
But be what? And now it’s half past five and she’s calling up to me.
Time, dear, she sings, to be the sous chef you were called to be.