Fall Breakfast

The omelette sunrise soaks
fall-toasted fields in golden yolk.
Geese vees move above trees
and chimney smoke.

Let's bring our slippered feet,
our steaming mugs of whetted heat,
out to the wind-chilled wicker.
Let's take a seat.

And feast.

"So we live here, forever taking leave..."

Every so often, four or five times a year, for no reason that I can yet put my finger on, I will find myself inexplicably awake and usually bubbling with happiness at some pre-dawn hour. This was one of those mornings. I woke at 4 am, three hours before my alarm, and my heart was jumping with excitement. After scrambling into my running clothes and snatching up my iPOD, I tiptoed up the stairs and crept out the front door, where an icy breeze kept me company as I ran up the little hill in front of my apartment to the gravelly trail, and then started towards Scenic Highway. The sky was a rimy landscape of clouds and constellations, and spun just enough ghost gray light to assure my footing and to bleach the outcroppings of boulder and bluff to my right. Chattanooga's lights jewelled the air between the bare branches of trees on my left.

I've been reading Rilke recently, trying to understand him, and these words from his "Duino Elegies" were on my mind as I returned home, muting my music and just feeling the beat of my shoes on gravel, the air rushing in and out of my lungs.

"...Often a star
was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you
out of the distant past, or as you walked
under an open window, a violin
yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission:
But could you accomplish it? Weren't you always
distracted by expectation, as if every event
announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place
to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you
going and coming and often staying all night.)"

I love the way he speaks of taking notice of the world as mission, one that is too vast for me to accomplish. However, I get the feeling that desire, for Rilke, is a limiting thing, a thing that sours any experience of beauty, that distracts us from taking due notice of what we've been given. I prefer to side with Lewis on the topic of desire: that it is a proof that we were made for a different world. My expectations, far from distracting me from my mission, instead make me aware that deeper meaning underlies each event. In that sense, each event does announce a Beloved. And praise, while still a mission, is also (more Lewis) "appointed consummation." ("I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation." C.S. Lewis)

So I can "begin again and again the never-attainable praising" as Rilke urges, while not feeling the least bit diminished by my lack of attainment.

catfish and code blues

I am enjoying my new job, now that my grasp on its demands is sure and my acquaintanceship with coworkers and employees is strengthening. In what context other than the serving line (dishing hot food onto customers' plates) is "Catfish!" an acceptable and even sensible response to "Hello!"?

I'm even learning a little bit about the culinary arts. For example, adding hot water and stirring it into hours-old creamed potatoes and vegetables will work a temporary miracle of revivication. Nothing can make a pot of greens look appetizing. Catfish is edible!--a fact that still makes me shudder, linked as it is in my brain with memories of a friend's aquarium of bewhiskered mottled slimy catfish, and also rumors (urban myths?) of Volkswagon-sized catfish snuffling over river bottoms.

Then I get to enjoy the immortal flirtatious teasing of aged men, the sweet precocity of children. Who knew I'd be able to dramatically beg people not to "shoot the messenger" as often as I do when, seated behind the register, I am compelled to extort $4 plus tax for three measly chicken tenders, $3 plus tax for a limp slice of day-old cheese pizza.

It can be a sad place to work. A hospital cafeteria is hardly most people's fine dining choice. Every so often someone will share a grief with me: a mother dying, a husband with kidney failure discovering he also is riddled with cancer, a 25-year-old man losing his battle with brain tumors after three years of struggling. In the context of such heartache, I find it it easy to forgive a petty complaint, an impatient demeanor, a sharp retort. In some ways, I am glad for these reactions, glad to offer some sort of outlet for bitterness or grief.

A chill always passes over me when I hear a "Code Blue" announced over the speaker system: adult heart failure: an infrequent but sobering interruption to the day's work. It's a reminder that all around my insulated hub of commerce, lives are being handled with both care and perfunctoriness. My heart flings a prayer heavenward, and then I keep dishing out food, wiping down tables, refilling plastic silverware, taking people's money.

With care, but also perfunctorily.

Learning to love Rilke...

"To Music"

Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:
silence of paintings. You language where all language
ends. You time
standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.

Feelings for whom? O you the transformation
of feelings into what?--: into audible landscape.
You stranger: music. You heart-space
grown out of us. The deepest space in us,
which, rising above us, forces its way out,--
holy departure:
when the innermost point in us stands
outside, as the most practiced distanced, as the other
side of air:
pure,
boundless,
no longer habitable.

--Rainer Maria Rilke--
(translation by Stephen Mitchell)