offering

thread noodles through your fingers
cut fresh lemons into the iced tea
slice an avocado into eight pristine wedges
rinse the lettuce with great tenderness
make an artful arrangement of watermelon and mango
and small crimson plums

this is just the beginning
this will not lead you to salvation
this will not be your passageway to freedom
it will not mend your heart or anyone else's

it will simply be the meal from which
you will rise, after your water glass has been drained,
to enter a room with unfamiliar furniture
where a great stripping will occur, birds pecking
at the roof and dashing themselves against the windows

your body will twist and shudder, you will remember
the cheesecake cooling on a rack in the kitchen,
and you will want to run

you will not run

instead, you will hold your palm against
the great heart of the room,
the deep mystery of its earth, and a meal
not of your own making will come to greet you
with a ferocity and shatter and ruin and beauty
you will not have words for,
and you will weep from such an offering

how to separate beauty from elegance

The avocado, ripening on the windowsill, doesn’t know
the eight smooth slivers I will cut from it
come dinner time. It doesn’t greet, with anticipation,
its marriage with cilantro and lime when the hour arrives
for festivity. It doesn’t recognize even the salt that will turn it
into a more yielding condiment, a thin layer spread underneath
two slices of smoked turkey, a single leaf of romaine, a thick
and deeply juicy wedge of an heirloom tomato. The avocado,
like Atlas shouldering the earth, has no choice
but to accept the task of holding all else that is above it,
and so it bends quietly, gently, generously, at its knees,
sacrificing willingly its seed, its skin, its oval wholeness,
the valuable real estate where the afternoon sun
was casting its slim but incisive blessing.

The avocado is by no means lovely. It is of a green barely
noticeable among the blushing apricots, the voluptuous aubergine,
the glass bowl brimming almost catastrophically with the season’s
first golden peaches. Its surface, lunar and lumpy,
could never be called elegant.
The plums, glassy on the sideboard, are the ones to ask
if what you want is to be wooed. You could turn to the sinuous almond
to fill your vacant hours, or a single opulent strawberry to meet,
with bright and easy charm, your temporary longing.

Still, it is the avocado I’ve chosen. It is the avocado I see,
resting in the shadow of its neighboring bounty,
and it is the avocado on which my hunger has landed so decisively
it takes barely a second to acknowledge it, and even less time 
to reach toward uppermost shelf and wrap a fistful around that fruit,
which is waiting there in all its unglory, its perennial awkwardness,
and yet which, in its civility, its selfless and delicate bow
to those more fortunate in beauty, has never been more beautiful.

and when she returned

and when she returned to the street she came from,
stopping courteously for the dogs and toddlers being herded
away from last night’s puddles, when she drove past the redwoods
holding court over the sweet Craftsmans and greeted her neighbor’s
green lawn, when she saw the plum tree’s spilled offerings on the road,
small maroon orbs dotting the gravel, when she watched the mailman
dip into his canvas bag for this neighborhood’s turn at the latest
Crate & Barrel catalogue, when she saw this picturesque town
bathed in the warm, lilac-scented glow of such comfort, she thought
of all the breezy afternoons she had spent here, how it once was
so simple to walk out the door and into the welcome arms of these suburbs,
how the plantings in her own yard - which she had helped purchase
and then lift into the earth to flourish – were, in fact, now flourishing,
and how, as much as she had tried to keep her own soul watered and fed,
it hadn’t quite succeeded here, in this pleasant bedroom community, where
it was easy to park and find a dentist, where she did not have to look far
for a good bike ride, where she could buy fleshy heirloom tomatoes
so perfect and red they made her want to cry, but where she was
without her luster, her bright heart, her stretch and stride, and where
she knew she couldn't stay, in spite of all these ripe gifts, that in order
to lift herself to the right soil, she would have to locate some other spot of earth,
to leave this placid scene, to find an address that gave her a new kind of serenity,
perhaps another life entirely, where she could, at last, through an open window,
recognize herself.