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Soup

I make soup and name the seasonings:
parsley, the damp tears that,
homesick, I planted in the loved earth.
Tiny black pepper eyes. Mice in the walls,
the bullets we will have to bite,
sharp clove stars inside the blue pillow
I put over my feet every night
so nothing gets away. I add
sweet basil, mint or saint;
a small procession of bay leaf,
laurel. Salt stream, salt water,
sea anemone. The chatter of barnacles
stuck to the rocks, gull cry and kestrel.
Chicken carcass, soft bone marrow,
once feathered, this bed
for vegetables I know to speak to:
the riven onions, train whistle.
Limp celery stalks I hold up to the light
and try to see through, cold hands.
Potato skins, weathered leather,
cinched saddles and compost.
Rutabaga, sore toe, a sudden
drop in barometric pressure,
rich Minnesota farmland
where yellow leaves were swept
across the burned fields.
What floats through the blue air
is feathers, is white rice,
falling into pottage, into hunger,
wet snow that vanishes,
the steaming ground.

-- Maggie Anderson

Maggie Anderson

4409

sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness

--Galway Kinnell, lines from "Saint Francis and the Sow"

Saint Francis and the Sow