Research: Journals

The Journal

Past Issues

27.2

Penelope Austin

Lenticchie in Umido

The trick here is not to cook the lentils until they
fall apart. They must be tender but still firm
enough to hold their shape.
—Lynne Rossetto Kasper, The Splendid Table

Off the shelf, the hard-shelled lentils stream
from the glass jar’s bulb, their homey clatter
the ticking of humility. I measure fistfuls

of brown, sexless, flat-faced button, actual
as summer dirt collected under nails
that have scratched holes in mean clay footing

a fire escape, with bruised lunulae,
eking radishes under interminably blue,
too blue, sky. What a day to cook:

A whiteout, any imaginable color
hulked down beneath winter’s futile autonomy;
inside, our gold and purple walls anomalous

skins of ripe fruit. Spread the lentils
in a shallow baking dish. Capon
broth cooked gently (Say one hundred between each bubble.),

steeped so long its bones disintegrate.
Our house of broth, of burgundy flannel sheets,
the high-backed oak bed. She sits cross-

legged, crumpled at the foot, diffident,
defiant, and comes out, her eyes not like modest
lentils, but like shells lodged in the fact

of the sand, like White Sails grown in well-crocked pots:
They start life green, become white, and then revert
again to green with age. Copper bands

of hair flat gone ash in the meager light
allowed in through snow-blanked windows, crackling
static in dry air as she twirls the ends.

The copper stockpot flares red, flame
licking the lip, goes cold. This feels
like the end of cooking, like pots hanging unused,

the creep of cobwebs gathering. This feels
like the end of the crumpled page I smooth out to the plane
of sand in a flat landscape, hands brown,

aggravated, digging at the roots of duneweeds sprouted
under the moon, tearing them away for love, for love.
What would it have been like for her to grow

up in the empty mouth of a scream
as the child in Nova Scotia still recalls:
Now there is no scream. Once there was one

and it settled slowly down to earth one hot
summer afternoon; or did it float
up, into that dark, too dark, blue sky?

But surely it has gone away, forever.
I mark the middle of my life as where
the white begins to turn back into green,

and I am now the she. I am the mother.
I wore the mauve garter and push-up bra,
I spread my legs. I played the loony, the victim,

the flat-out unloved long enough to believe in it,
then laid away my scream in the waste brimming
the ocean. I conceived my child. Cooked her up.

Plotted. Potted. She unwinds from the end
of the bed, scuffs away. My love for her
is datum, a lentil. She’s had it. Now she gives

me leave to unfold the scream from my adolescent
nightgown, to shake from it the darkest blue.
I must be everything I want myself.

Still in no time her image coalesces
in fragrant beads of steam hovering above lentils,
her eyes the beautiful white sails, filling the house

as all her life, like all of mine, has blackened
my pages. Why not? We have had a blizzard.
Were we to venture out we’d write that ashes

smudge the shoulder-high banks of snow. As if
our icy walks don’t scare enough, the plow
has crossed the paths we shoveled for ourselves.

And now there will be no getting through.