I eat off old plates here, my grandparents’
grandparents’, translucent to age, a blue
light, that, snowlike, settles in the kitchen. I own no others
yet. Over dinner, I dream of platters, bowls,
of eating plateless stews suspended in the kitchen’s
stewing summer air. In the sink, plates stack
with shale’s cold, uncertain consternation.
I secrete these vertebrae, the house’s cold,
blue lamplike spine. This is the house
of language. When I moved in,
the house was eating blue and bitter sloe
berries from unimaginable plates.
Its lungs grew thick with small and fragrant
fruit. The wooden floors were stained with stringency.
I lived this way for years, a corridor life,
an old plate and then another, until a neighbor’s
neighbor told me of the neighbor laboring in particolored
cutleries, unheard-of utensils of love, tableware,
tableware. We went to pay a visit. You opened
the door, and everywhere was language, no
apartment’s pat partitions, only the dancing light
of unknowing, of vessels I have not found names for.
