What the Light Teaches

Steven Outram

What the Light Teaches

Language is the house with lamplight in its windows,

visible across fields. Approaching, you can hear

music; closer, smell

soup, bay leaves, bread - a meal for anyone

who has only his tongue left.

It's a country; home, family;

abandoned, burned down; whole lines dead, unmarried.

For those who can't read their way in the streets,

or in the gestures and faces of strangers,

language is the house to run to;

in wild nights, chased by dogs and other sounds,

when you've been lost a long time,

when you have no other place.

There are nights in the forest of words

when I panic, every step into thicker darkness,

the only way out to write myself into a clearing,

which is silence.

Nights in the forest of words

when I'm afraid we won't hear each other

over clattering branches, over

both our voices calling.

In winter, in the hour

when the sun runs liquid then freezes,

caught in the mantilla of empty trees;

when my heart listens

through the cold stethoscope of fear,

your voice in my head reminds me

what the light teaches.

Slowly you translate fear into love,

the way the moon's blood is the sea.

Anne Michaels

This is one of my favorite images - light from a distant window. If you’ve ever been out for a long walk at night when the air turns chill, you’ll know that nothing can make you feel more lonesome or full of longing than the light of a home window. It can be either the anticipation of warmth and welcome, or the cruel reminder that you are outside.  I absolutely love the line, “Language is the house with lamplight in its windows, visible across fields.” I have to pause and think. Is she saying that language is the hope of warmth and belonging, the invitation to relationships, to shelter? “Language is the house to run to.” How interesting. Until this poem, I had not thought of it like that. Writing, speech, language, can be a place to find yourself when you’ve been lost. It’s true, isn’t it? “Slowly you translate fear into love.” And isn’t that exactly what we’re attempting? To write out (or speak out) the darkness, the lostness, the loneliness – to work our way Home? Is Language that magic? Can words do all that?

What's That Smell in the Kitchen?

Lieke van der Vorst

What's That Smell In the Kitchen?

All over America women are burning dinners.
It's lamb chops in Peoria; it's haddock
in Providence; it's steak in Chicago;
tofu delight in Big Sur; red
rice and beans in Dallas.
All over America women are burning
food they're supposed to bring with calico
smile on platters glittering like wax.
Anger sputters in her brainpan, confined
but spewing out missiles of hot fat.
Carbonized despair presses like a clinker
from a barbecue against the back of her eyes.
If she wants to grill anything, it's
her husband over a slow fire.
If she wants to serve him anything
it's a dead rat with a bomb in its belly
ticking like the heart of an insomniac.
Her life is cooked and digested
nothing but leftovers in Tupperware.
Look, she says, once I was roast duck
on your platter with parsley but now I am Spam.
Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.

Marge Piercy


Cooking and food are such rich topics for thought and conversation. All of life can be discussed in terms of food.  After all, what is more personal than preparing the meal that sustains a human being? But then there's the cook. Does she add to the flavour? Is her mood or intent an ingredient of the sauce? You better believe it. Cooking can be love, but it can be battle just as well.  Be good to the cook.

At Home in Winter

Norman Rockwell

At Home in Winter

1.

We sit across from one another

in front of the fire, the big logs

clicking and hissing. Outside

is bitter chill: branches stiffen,

grow brittle as crystal. You're

sewing a skirt, your mouth

full of pins, your head swimming

with Greek and Latin. You frown

so not to swallow any pins when

you try to smile at me

slumped under my TLS and bewailing

the seepage of my days, the way

my life runs off like water, yet

inexplicably happy at this moment

balanced between us like a tongue

of flame skiving a pine-log: seeming

to breathe, its whole involuntary life

spent giving comfort. This

could be a way to live - nothing

going to waste, such fullness

taking off, warm space, a fragrance.

In plain matter of fact it's

the sight of you bending to baste

the blue skirt before you pleat and

sew the waistband in, that enters

and opens inside me, so for a moment

I am an empty centre, nothing

at all

then back to this home truth

unchanged: you patiently taking

one thing at a time as I can't,

all the while your head beating with

hexameters and foreign habits. So

I go on reading in silence as if

I hadn't been startled into another life

for an instant all fire, all fragrance.

2.

I blow in from the noonwhite bite of snow

to find the whole house fragrant as a haycock

with the soup you've stirred up, its spirit

seeping into closets, curtains, bedrooms -

a prosperous mix of chicken-stock, carrots,

garlic, onion, thyme. All morning you've

wreathed your head in it, and turn to me now

like a minor deity of earth and plenty,

your hands dipped to the wrist in the flesh

of vegetables, your fingers trailing

threads from the glistening bones

cairned on the counter-top. You stand

on the edge of a still life - twist-strips

of onion peel, papery garlic sacs, bright

stumps of carrots, the delicate grass-green

stems of parsley, that little midden

of bones. Spell-stopped, I see how

in the middle of my daily life a sober house

with its feet on the ground, snowbound,

turns to spirit of chicken, airs a vegetable

soul, and breathes on me. Wooden spoon

still steaming, you turn away and say

in no time now we'll sit, and eat.

Eamon Grennan

“This could be a way to live –nothing going to waste…warm space, a fragrance.” Like a pine-log in the fireplace, “seeming to breathe, its whole involuntary life spent giving comfort.” The way Grennan describes the feeling of the house, and the person of his wife through her actions, is lovely. She is creating and transforming their home, their relationship. The bit about her conjuring the spirit of chicken and a vegetable soul within a snowbound house makes me smile. We happen to be snowbound also, at the moment, and I think after reading this, I may have to make us some chicken soup. (There you go, another practical use for poetry – to inspire cooking.)