The Tuesday Poem: Master Chef

In a little while will you come and cook the chicken —

climb down our stairs under Vermeer’s blue-gowned muse,

pass the four glass squares of our green front door and walk

to the kitchen through the white-washed rooms?

Will you leave the things you love — Robert Bly, Francis Ponge,

Wagner’s screeching sirens, and come to look at our chicken?

I want you to pepper and lemon it, thyme it with your fingers,

fatten it with butter, press succulent rhymes under its skin

so that it is a roast of rhythms, metaphors and garlic, clever puns,

limes and lyrics, throbbing oven songs between our sky-blue presses.

The cat on the yard wall licks its lips, T-shirts on the washing line

are a stirring armless, headless screen protecting your great work.

O master cook, O my fine poet, my much loved chef, even the man

dangling from the green crane that swings over Patrick Street

pauses to inhale your culinary odours rising sweeter than the weed

he inhales before jumping to his death.

We push the kitchen window open, poetry rushing into the skies,

a plough, a Venus, a firmament of ideas! —

your hair a scribble of lines, your kiss sweet as a haiku on my cheek,

and this chicken startling the darkness into a well-fed dawn.