Things I'd Love to Know (Part One)

I'd want you to show me around the kitchen
so I could understand how to
make stuffed mushrooms so plump and full,
and I could know the preciseness of the fresh pesto
that I saw you picking basil for-
kneeling in the soft, upturned soil, the green in each pluck.

I want to know about your carrot cake
that Dad loves so much.
The recipe written in your hand feels close
but not the same as your hand taking mine
over the mixing spoon.

I picture my children
watching me from their swingset,
on a breezy summer day,
as I pick vegetables in the garden,
and I look up at them, and at the sky,
my knees in the dirt.

Alexandra Ustach

2nd draft

Privelege of Being, by Robert Hass

• Many are making love. Up above, the angels
• in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing
• are braiding one another’s hair, which is strawberry blond
• and the texture of cold rivers. They glance
• down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy—
• it must look to them like featherless birds
• splashing in the spring puddle of a bed—
• and then one woman, she is about to come,
• peels back the man’s shut eyelids and says,
• look at me, and he does. Or is it the man
• tugging the curtain rope in the dark theater?
• Anyway, they do, they look at each other;
• two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious,
• startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet
• lubricious glue, stare at each other,
• and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder pathetically
• like lithographs of Victorian beggars
• with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags
• in the lewd alleys of the novel.
• All of creation is offended by this distress.
• It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,
• rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it,
• it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that
• they close their eyes again and hold each other, each
• feeling the mortal singularity of the body
• they have enchanted out of death for an hour or so,
• and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man,
• I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized
• that you could not, as much as I love you,
• dear heart, cure my loneliness,
• wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him
• that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.
• And the man is not hurt exactly,
• he understands that his life has limits, that people
• die young, fail at love,
• fail of their ambitions. He runs beside her, he thinks
• of the sadness they have gasped and crooned their way out of
• coming, clutching each other with old, invented
• forms of grace and clumsy gratitude, ready
• to be alone again, or dissatisfied, or merely
• companionable like the couples on the summer beach
• reading magazine articles about intimacy between the sexes
• to themselves, and to each other,
• and to the immense, illiterate, consoling angels.