The world contains
crab fried rice & is thus beautiful.
Or: crab fried rice
is more beautiful than the world.
Which is true?
Which is truer?
The world is terrible & people
are beautiful.
Or: people are terrible & the world—
beautiful.
I know this:
life is a joy & living’s hard.
In other words,
being alive, isn’t that the hardest joy?
& love,
a kind of death
that means you’re living.
Or is love
the very aliveness that helps you
to, one day, die?
Please tell me
if I’m wrong, but I think it’s
like this: love,
when it’s love, is a world, a kinder
here in which you wake
after a nap
that followed something of an argument
to the smell of rice cooking,
no, cooked rice reheating, & then
you’re at the table,
watching scallions fall
on all that crab, a huge helping, true
heaping of both,
delivered by the hands that know you
terribly well.
Let’s talk,
he says, he who knows you
love crab & scallions, hate
confrontations, these meetings with
truth, your own
innermost &
the innerly together. But,
as your heart or
more crucially, your belly, knows—
they have to happen.
So why not
over this radiant bowl of rice?
Little feast, like
what your parents made
for you,
plus the kind of
conversation they rarely made
with you.
Love as food & words, both.
& maybe
there’s still
a beautiful chance for this both
with them.
They must sense it, too, how being alive
is the most serious thing
& living—
the funniest. But first, sit
with him.
Eat. & talk. Remember
to chew.
2025