Still more regimented than the daily runs
are your trips to the supermarket. The tense hunts
on cans and cartons for additives, dyes, animal
fats and coconut oils, all the grabbing at once
for oat bran waffles and oat bran English muffins,
the orchestrated turning of backs on caffeine,
red meat, salt, sugar, butter, eggs,
finding the fish oil capsules, the Lean Cuisine,
the complex carbohydrates—pasta in salad or box.
As yet only two of you collapsed, I’ve heard,
into supermarket neurosis, one mate has rebelled
at the low cholesterol of too much bean curd.
Dear friends, dear aging hearts that are stressed by young
surges and shocks of feeling, dear minds aquiver,
their stiffening vessels bulged with the rush of fresh
insights, jokes, dreams, may you live forever!
But let me taste, while I’m here, the new flavors
of otherness in your changing cases and shelves,
plucking with free, unguarded gluttony
that keeps my tongue in spiced surprise at your selves.
For we die of sameness too, or die to each other.
Familiarity, like a child, may fold
a monstrous lettuce leaf and cut away
till flat, green folk, unfolded, are holding hands,
then serve that undressed salad of friends each day.
Abundance! Incalculable abundance in each
of you may I shop among. Once I found
your image in a dream-like, time-pressed tour
of foreign Food Halls—cathedral-high, profound
in the mystery of the not-yet-served-or-tasted.
I glimpsed warm pigeon salad with walnuts, wild
boar, roe deer and hare patés, quail mousse,
rosepetal vinegar. Wealth-dazed, beguiled
by one glance at a take-out dish called “Love in Disguise”—
a calf’s heart coated with vermicelli and breadcrumb,
I saw ahead a darkened aisle, roped off:
the sacred privacy where no one should come.
(Storeroom of the I, where secret recipes
and orders go forth to the world outside the skin,
is as dark, perhaps, to the I as to anybody,
and love is least likely to lighten the deepest bin.)
For the sweet quotidian your supermarkets
more than suffice. They’re dependable—I know
what each one stocks—yet at unexpected times
new ices, canned goods or seafoods are put on show.
I know where to reach for what, but a joy of friendship
is the strange savor that answers to no felt lack.
Even the steadfast store that I know best,
the closest to me, brought forth a few years back
the kiwi I’d never tasted; one day the first
tang of arugula appeared. No treat
in mind today, I picked out produce I needed.
Something called jicama rolled and fell at my feet.
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