​Conseils Nutritionnels


Eat the best lamb chop first.
Better to choke on it
Than the bad one.

Never order well-done
Beef or overcooked
Vegetables.

A good cook, like a good
Teacher, serves then gets
Out of the way.

To make a friend for life
Beg a bad cook for
The recipe.





Loading the Dishwasher


Anarchists of the scullery, esprits 
libres, do it haphazardly, disdain 
convention’s place-for-everything--
glasses wobble down below, upside-down 
bowls fill three slots above, knife blades 
bristling any which way point handwards.  

The dutifully conventional first scrape 
every plate and pot, certain even one 
stray pea will gum up the labor-saving 
contraption, condemn them to the dreaded 
service call; they rhyme cups with dishes, 
in punctilio seeking safety and thrift.

Then there are the eccentrics, originals
with a private feng shui of dirty dishware 
who can’t stand one mug wrongly nested, 
their modes of loading as personal 
as how they brush their teeth, poets who’d
never let you touch their fountain pens.


​

 Song the Painter Sings While Stretching a New Canvas


                A nomad near his filthy tent,
                amid the sands and desert heat,
                sets up his loom in excrement
                and weaves his rug for dirty feet.

                Out of ordure, colors and lines;
                for all the pictures ever hung
                and all the intricate designs
                are born in dirt and camel dung.



The Painter Stops to Consider a Problem Without Success


            Yogi Berra said it best, hollering at
            Stengel one day when he went up to bat.
            (Coaches coached, yet his slump endured for months.)
            “Damn!” yelled Yogi, “I can’t think and hit at once!”

            Useless to think unless the body thinks.
            Well I know the Law, though the spirit sinks
            beneath its doom:  not by trial and success;
            nothing but error can clean up this mess.



To His Astonishment the Painter Does Something Right


            King Solomon pronouncing judgment was
            no less precise, nor that old Greek with two
            sticks and one sharp mind who measured the world.
            Though I saw it, and am seeing still, with
            my own eyes, I can’t believe I did it.
            How is it that the paint should guide the brush;
            the brush the hand; the hand this addled brain?



The Painter Learns from His Painting


            I did not truly have a foot until
            that one there reared up and lectured me
            on what Foot truly is.  “I am Foot,”
            he declared, “like nothing else at all.
            I move and bend and grasp but I’m no hand.
            I run but I’m not time . . . well, and so forth.
            You get the idea, don’t you?”  Yes, I did.

            I tell you frankly that this painting
            painted me; just so we are improvised
            by music and scribbled by our hardest texts.



The Painter Dreams of His Most Recent Self-Portrait

​
            Up against the outside of the inside
            of the Institute, toes wrapped about
            this highest rung, each other part, as
            cheek and jowl and lip and gut and tool,
            pushed flat, lying crushed, body into paint
            like a fly swatted in spaghetti sauce:
            the stuff was like that, fragrant and sweet;
            I was like that, squirming in polychrome.
            Were my hands now brushes or brushes hands?
            Near the end Old Renoir, Old Matisse had
            theirs strapped to their wrists to keep up the game.
            In my sleep I too flailed like a master.