Tonight, this kitchen is not a place
the foreign or the faint of heart
would willingly choose to enter:
I’ve fried a panful of air-dried, salted,
and butterflied fish (is that why we hear
the wail of the neighbor’s cat, or is it merely
in heat?)— So what if the smoky haze sits
thick in the air, is likely seeping through
windows, clinging to drapes and furniture?
I’ve sliced three plum tomatoes to toss
with a squirt of lime, chopped scallions
and a handful of cilantro. All this,
because the homesick tongue has dreamt
thin, golden crumbs of fish dipped in
a saucerful of vinegar, crushed garlic,
and bird’s eye chillies; followed by
a mouthful of hot jasmine rice scooped
up with the fingers. Why is feasting
on and touching this simple food such
a pleasure? Mornings, we have a little
hail of cereal grains hitting the sides
of the bowl; then the thin, cold
stream of milk. Lunch is often skipped,
in favor of coffee. And how many times
can the trio of salad, meat, and potatoes
exercise their dinner charms? The stove
flicks on, the bottom of the pan heats
to a coppery red. Sometimes the hungry,
rusted parts of memory call out for more
salt, more tang: more time to linger.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Listening to Piazzolla’s Tango Etudes
- Eating Dried Fish With Our Hands
- Encore
- Dear nostalgia,
- What We Look For
- Without Translation
- Heart Weighted With Cares
- Fables
- Tableaux Vivants
- Listening to Chopin’s Prelude in D-flat Major, Op. 28, No. 15
- Fountains
- Dear solitude,
- Nocturne
- Frontispiece
- Landscape, with Notes of Red
- Blue Stone Blues
- Landscape, with a Glimpse of the Soul as it Leaves the Body
- How I Came to Writing
- When does the hunger abate;
- Dear errant winds at dusk,
- Aerogramme
- Dear scarlet-flushed, hydraulic,
- Monday’s News
- Counterpoints
- Landscape, with Traces of Prior Events
- On the Nature of Things
- Spell Against Grey
- Landscape, with Castoffs on the Sidewalk
- Sleepless Ghazal
- Last Call
- Delivery Confirmation
- Landscape, with Early Frost and a Dream Interior
- Campus Elegy
- Petrichor
- Ghazal: Chimerae
- Maguindanao Ghazal
- Insurgent Song
- Paper Ghazal
- Ghazal of the Transcendental
- Hot Lyric
- On the sense of danger or foreboding, the prickling
- Postcard from the Labyrinth
- Hunger
- Debris
- Letter to One Seeking Flight
- Unbelievable Ends
- In the chapel of perpetual adoration,
- Night Rain
- Conversation that Ends with a Dream of Accounting
- Lyric on the Edge of Winter
- Paper Cut #2
- Herald
- Walking
- And once again,
- Prayer Among the Stones
- Call and Response
- Recover
- Dark Prayer
- Song of Snow
- Santa Milagrita
- Song without Strings
- Morning Song
“Sometimes the hungry,
rusted parts of memory call out for more
salt, more tang …”
How true! Beautiful Luisa.
Thanks, Uma!
A HUNGRY MEMORY
Frolic among seaweeds we would gather into mounds
not unlike this fall sundown’s first raking of the leaves:
I remember him laughing at my crown of sargasso; I
could still taste the brine on his fingers when he fed me
masticated rice and dried fish singed over our seaside fire.
O, Father, is there any way we could go back to that sea?
Would the long shadows on these porch walls spring you
out of my mind’s eye, dig you out of my heart? If I prayed
like I have never begged before, will you to pull me out
of this hammock, race me to the tallest rock on Poro Pt.?
Will you then mockingly laugh how flabby I have grown,
and how I needed to eat dried fish from your bare hands
and wash them down with lemon-and-salt-spiked anise.?
How long will this rusted memory last? Will you linger?
— Albert B. Casuga
09-25-11
“A Hungry Memory” is also reposted at: http://ambitsgambit.blogspot.com/2011/09/hungry-memory.html and the Facebook