Rice
There are countless variations in a life, endless
leaf-strewn paths we might walk to our end,
but what we choose is what we endure.
Angel and Apostle
Deborah Noyes
I never pour a cup of rice but that I gather
each grain that spills out with anxious care--I press
my fingers into it each and am impressed:
it has imbedded a purpose--which is nothing
other than to grow. It sits in water
in the lap of blind mercy or grace or just plain
circumstance: of rain of yellow heat of hands
and feet moving through anonymously. Tend upright
uproot glean…all the way from there to me
it made it to the counter only to tip off the lip
of a steel measuring cup whose handle
is ready to fall off completely. I can’t stand it.
The water it wants or wants it is boiling its buttered roil.
Each white hard seed is sufficient unto me. Each
like the 400,000 I’m given in my mother’s blood--
Jesus! So many! Maybe I’m too much of myself.
The thin give of the husked bleached grain. The grind
of the salt, the beef bones I boiled for the broth. The finding
each spill and tipping it into the mouth of the waiting
wet furnace--and then the cover-up. The slow coming
back to simmer on the low heat. Rice. Once one
undercover of its mother’s sheaf of green and all
that hard time done, comes to soften after all,
on my tongue one and one and one each unto each
until it is enough to please. Maybe that’s the peace
I mourn to see, when I see, in the crack of creamy
grout, beside the ivory counter tile, one I’d missed
and it’s waiting for me. Patient. Silent. Nonchalant.
Sits. Then, indented in the pillow of my thumb. This one
I eat, hard, starch unyielding as dry pasta, all on
its own. I think we know one another better like this. Single.
We know more now than we could have otherwise
for my missing the cup, missing the first and second
and third sweep through. The passing night. My blindness.
It’s waiting.
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