Basta! I Am Not The Same These Days

More than merely alchemizing calcium to pearl,
a sea change prods another being, far beyond so many limits
in which its recipient felt furled – or even knew were there:
preliminary focus might be rocky ocean floor beneath
the water, but its repercussive resonances alter air.

Some odd insistent funny loving yet dispassionate incursion
of a sense inside has sent me on a ride that seemed
at first one merely taken in the mind: a metaphoric egg
had cracked conceptually: what spilled out was seamlessness.
And now dichotomies have evanesced, divisions are illusory,

the body is the soul – the word made flesh – darkness
is the same as brightness: night is day – and my own symphony
of skin and limb and muscle, bone and certain very
precious other sweet appurtenances now appear to have
their own experience of blood-hot life – which they each push me

to express: and sometimes with a knife; to wit: the slicing
of a dozen broccoli florets which then my fingers toss into
a sauté pan – short span of blazing heat in olive oil and garlic –
and then gently steam before I season them with salt and hot red
pepper flakes (my cooking muscles do not doubt what

they have also done to Brussels sprouts): tossed in squiggly
pasta. Basta! I am not the same these days, and neither is what
flames upon my stove and roves into my maw. I shall embody
an inimitably brand new year: undoing fear of isolation
and replacing it with awe. Sautéed broccoli is its law.




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