We did not eat our oatmeal alone, so it was already a good thing,

                unlike what Galway Kinnell said in the poem you read me the day

                after Christmas.  His was glutinous, lumpy, had "a hint of slime."

                You mixed apricots, Monukka raisins and almonds, poured in some cream.

                "This poem goes with it," you said, and the couch where we ate the oatmeal

                thickened with poets.  First, of course, Galway.  He brought in Keats

                for companionship, and lickety-split there was Edmund Spenser

                and John Milton.  Spenser and Milton didn't say anything, but Keats

                was telling Galway about "Ode to a Nightingale," if you can believe it.

                No, we did not eat alone.  There were friends

                and friends of friends not even present—ghosts, you could even say,

                not a phoneme less real than these disembodied poets—

                bearing food and stories improbable and exotic, like Sally's dead sculptor,

                a World War II ESP agent.  "The government used them, you know," she said.

                When the Germans caught him, he rolled bread rations into small figures

                before eating them.  Every sculpture he made, he told Sally, was formed

                first then, in bread.  And your friend Skye, the vibrational medicine

                therapist, explaining the inexplicable Jin Shin Jyutsu.  Who could notice

                the snow, which had begun its own prodigious story, while we wrapped words

                and smiles around each other.  No, we did not eat oatmeal alone.

                "Better for your mental health," Galway said, "if someone eats it with you."

                The good snow fell long and long Christmas night, whistling, sibilant, sensual,

                urgent white, like the Yes Yes Yeses we gave and opened for each other.

                      Copyright © 2004 The Writers' Center at Chautauqua, Inc.