Seasoning
- Seasoning
Moving from right to left like Hebrew prayers, I season supper: garlic, pepper, salt, oregano, perhaps, whose tang of farmyard beckons me away to fields long built on, to pots and spoons long rusted by slow rains under another sky, to tables set for those who will not share with me again the daily psalm and sacrament of food.
From right to left I season, left to right I put the condiments away. Such sleights of mind are how I signal memory home again to this dish, to keep from seasoning twice.
Where does it hide, this dissolution, wanderlust that springs to find us after the first good-byes and the last weddings? There’s not a perfume, not a ribbon of music that doesn’t wind somewhere away from this hour and place, as if all roads conspired to lead us out of what Rome we have, what room we know.
Well, I’m prepared: from right to left, like kaddish, I sprinkle salt on this flesh, all flesh; then, ecumenical, I cross it left to right in token of hope’s gospel, to hail the second coming— or the sun, whichever remembers to come first. [End Page 29]
rhina p. espaillat has published nine full-length books and three chapbooks, comprising poetry, essays, and short stories, in both English and her native Spanish. Her original work and her translations appear in numerous journals, in over sixty anthologies, and on dozens of websites, and have earned national and international awards.
