Recipe for a Winter’s Day in Three Courses

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_5/Bellas.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

Starter

Smoked meats,
nitrate free.
Local cheeses:
Peppered goat cheese
from Colrain,
Franklin County Camembert.
Good bread.
Pinot noir from southern France,
Languedoc region,
in 50-cent Goodwill glasses
etched with wild geese.
There are two birds
on each,
endlessly flying one
after the other
over tall grasses,
again
and again
as I turn them
in my hands.

***
Main course

We had an extra glass of wine,
the windows steamy,
snow falling
as in a snow globe
when we walked back
to find the vegetables
a little too mushy.
All soups have their own stories,
you told me,
and that makes this one.
Split pea soup is now
first snow, red wine, possibilities:
ingredients I wish I could bottle
and file under a new name –
one that could call forth
this particular moment,
bowl and bread and you.
Call it Auspicious-Friday-
Winter Night-Northampton
Bus Trip-Bad Picker-
Hopeful Dreamer-January
Soup. Words that mean nothing
to anyone else;
one of those recipes that never
comes out exactly the same
but is worth trying to get right again.

***
Dessert

The chocolate bar came with
instructions:
Look. Breathe. Snap.
It was Black Salt Caramel,
the salt from Hawaiian volcanoes,
which erupt
when I place a square on the roof of my mouth.
Hold it
there
with your tongue and
press.
The chocolate will melt in 30 seconds,
you read aloud
in a voice as smooth
as the cacao.
Listening to you is like
licking the burnt sugar caramel,
is music.lamplight.two bodies
on the floor
inches from kissing,
mouths sharing a taste
from an exotic place.
A vacation could last forever
in these endless minutes
but after awhile
we breathe again.