Charles Fishman
BREAKFAST AT THE LAKE
Don't you love good food and plenty
of time to eat it? No clock to tick
the mouthfuls. That, and you near me,
healing.
The fire crackles down to its last
embers. The lake is still -- not frozen
but held quiet by the steady hand
of January. You could drink in
that quiet for a century and not be
filled.
There! the flames rising again
of themselves: a moment out of childhood
when you still believed, the room --
gone dark and shadowy -- suddenly bright
again, a dream you'd waked from and were
now living.
Don't you love it, the way each forkful
eases you into morning? Months
we raced the clock, tempers hot
and flaring. And now, this food --
fried egg folded over mushrooms,
sweet peppers --
the fragrance of onion and fresh
dill soothing you again, salvaging
something that had seemed lost.
Copyright 1996, Charles Fishman
Charles Fishman served as director of the SUNY Farmingdale Visiting
Writers Program for 18 years and was the originator of the Paumanok Poetry
Award. His books include Mortal Companions (1977), The Firewalkers
(1996), Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust (1991),
and The Death Mazurka (Texas Tech, 1989). Fishman is currently Contributing
Editor for The Drunken Boat, a web-based poetry review, and serves
as a poetry consultant for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. His many
awards include a New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (1995),
the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize (1996), and the Eve of St. Agnes Award (1999).
"Breakfast at the Lake" first appeared in The Firewalkers (Avisson
Press, 1996) .
Switched-on Gutenberg/Vol. 4, No. 2
|