Home Cooking
/Brendan Galvin
I would cut my right arm off
for Magdalena Sacco, Foley said
out front of Ernie’s Pizza. We were
fifteen, of logic and non-sequitur
knew zero, but raised our eyebrows
to concede First Love. This morning
when I sliced a nine-grain loaf
too deeply with the serrated knife
I thought of that. My thumb pad bled
again. Bagels are toughest, but I
have wrung my hands in aloe
for not using kitchen mitts except
as sock puppets to make you laugh
in your living-room hospital bed.
Your favorite the red-bellied
woodpecker’s a regular at the suet
from there, and you can’t see me
in your kitchen butchering myself.
Hot skillet handshakes; cuts and nicks.
No microwave exploding veggies
fifty years ago in my bachelor pad.
A few pots boiled to black then, and some
pork chops solid as ashtrays,
but fear was never an ingredient
until the visiting nurses, wheelchair,
brace, this whole endeavor. Love, I will
take more care. I will not cut
my right arm off for you.
Author’s Note: My wife had a serious stroke before she passed away, and that left her in a hospital bed in the living room, with me in the kitchen doing the cooking. Since I’ve been writing poems for 57 years, I am always looking for subjects, and when this happened in the kitchen it recalled the events outside the pizza joint a few thousand years ago. I am always looking to combine things in my poems that really have nothing to do with each other.
For the last fifty-seven years, Brendan Galvin has been seriously writing poems, and is currently working on his twentieth volume. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, Atlantic, Harper’s, the New Republic, Nation, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Southern Review, Shenandoah, Tri-Quarterly, and many others. Habitat: New and Selected Poems 1965-2005 was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the Sotheby Prize of the Avon Foundation was awarded to him by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes in 1989. He has also written critical essays, book reviews, a translation of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis (Penn), and been a manuscript consultant for sixteen publishers, magazines, contests and arts commissions. Photo credit to Ellen Galvin.
