Poets are experts at holding mirrors to the world. Here Anne Caston, from Alaska, shows us a commonplace scene. Haven't we all been in this restaurant for the Sunday buffet? But by zooming in on the joint of meat and the belly-up fishes floating in butter, she compels us to look more deeply into what is before us, and a room that at first seemed humdrum becomes rich with inference.
Sunday Brunch at the Old Country Buffet
Madison, Wisconsin, 1996
Here is a genial congregation,
well fed and rosy with health and appetite, robust children in tow. They have come and all the generations of them, to be fed, their old ones too who are eligible now for a small discount, having lived to a ripe age.
Over the heaped and steaming plates, one by one, heads bow, eyes close; the blessings are said.
Here there is good will; here peace
on earth, among the leafy greens, among the fruits of the gardens of America's heartland. Here is abundance, here is the promised land of milk and honey, out of which a flank of the fatted calf, thick still on its socket and bone, rises like a benediction over the loaves of bread and the little fishes, belly-up in butter.
Reprinted from Flying Out with the Wounded, New York University Press, 1997. Copyright 1997 by Anne Caston.
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