Dream/Scheme

the art of making bread from tiger in a jar on Vimeo.

Kitchen 101

88% of our awareness is filtered through our eyes, while the other senses transmit the rest.  I think of this somewhere between considering that one should always add at least two more cloves of garlic to a meal than might seem humanly acceptable, that zucchini is the best vegetable ever, whether or not I am 'eating the rainbow' in this meal (and is the rainbow all it's really cracked up to be?), as well as the notion that one cook recently shared with me, namely that cooking, after sex, is the most intimate thing that we can do for one another--- we're preparing live things for someone to eventually put into their mouth (and maybe that's why, apart from being logistical trumpery, cooking alone can be so alienating).  All good and well, but the onions are sweating, and maybe it's too hot because they're looking a bit worn out and---oh, what spices!?!?---finally I'm sweating more than my onions and I'm crying (and thinking that we need to, as a society, somehow honor the sheer genius of this make-my-prey-cry self-defense mechanism that onions have somehow evolved and how it's like the plant equivalent to opposable thumbs).

Cooking is supposed to be relaxing?

One friend told me that cooking is really, really simple--- you just have to prepare everything beforehand.  In dicing and slicing, one creates space in which to simply contemplate what's at hand; some time to handle the vegetables, see exaclty what you're working with.  The odd tamato is already too soft.  Snake-skin belly of the red pepper.  Seeds peppered throughout the eggplant meat.  These are still living things in some sense, things that can very much so still be communicated with.  A feel-up at the market is one thing, but in undressing one's food, the intimacy begins.  And as we all know, the longer the buildup, the better.

I got it the other day, seemingly.  No music in the background.  One dice per heartbeat.  Watch the onions sweat, so you don't have to.  Sincerely, slow. 

Suddenly, as I stick my head over the plume of steam swelling from the sauteeing eggplant, I get a blast of a rich, woody/caramel waft that something deep down in my inherent animal constitution simply says yes to.  In that face-full of steam, the 12% of awareness normally dedicated to the 'other' senses came alive. 

And there it is--- now, I'm cooking.

While I Slept

Listen to the bushes swaying lazily
in the front yard, accept the soft teal
rimming a bluebird sky.

Sit where she sat, nights in which she avoided skies--
a girl loosing thunder, a
piercing gaze as she
clowns deep in that whole and perfect red,
in the roses one plants for the elderly,
in the toes one cannot pull from the dirt.

If there are good droughts then these
stones by the hydrangia are at hand to mark where
the water in her little body once ran
and the vision plays again: war paint's runing down her face
two centuries of salt.

I step backwards over lost ground
to listen to you
like a father.

I am in the backyard. 

Stranger,

go see the turning of the night,
the red flowers shaken
by passing trains, sun beat and
alwaysed; see the boy too soft to tell the
tale he is telling.

They made a city out of you
near the desert--
go see yourself in the world,
stranger,
know your birth way in blue
and ride trains until this land
runs out.

Your shoulder blade (a boomerang now)
runs back at my lips and seeing that arc wakes me
to this night of moments all standing still together without
a moon to send tides lapping against our knees.
Those moments strung out across
your back like birds forming for a long migration
break into syllables, letters, wisps--
traces of pictures on the walls of the
life making us.  Who sleeps on who's
shoulder, and who is whose mother, father;
who fell asleep wearing the weight
that pulls down fruit, planets, gazes, until our bodies
harden into place.  Who will
step out of that shell first, raise
their eyes, send their hand across the darkness,
cutting it open into light, and gather
the other in their arms, drawing our love as a circle--
never perfect,
never not.

First Ride

Recipe

stare for four minutes at
the milk-gaze on the eyes
in front of you until you begin
to see what happens
when a word is repeated so much
that it breaks down into disparate, illogical parts—
twitch, flare, the white halo cuting all else into
the nothingness only seen in maps, small furs
lining the pit, seedscrawling, the whisper-trace
of veins like on the sides of buildings
where all the vines have been ripped off,
a window or a globe or a bunch of little cells
conspiring to the miracle
of being seen.

blinking, and similies about stars are cliche.
remembering how the colors froze
and ripened in the climate of
hours, years, is not.  and if love is
a decision, then let the names of
our weeds and insects discuss what
to do while they inhabit our blind spots
and break down the things we leave
there to die.