LatinosUSA

An American visiting Madrid, my husband
plans to make chicken soup for the grandkids.
At the supermercado, he requests the chicken,
then finds the carrots.

Celery proves elusive. After two more shops,
a vain search for pale, tough stalks yields
a handful of dark greens resembling parsley,
wrapped in plastic. It will do.

In the kitchen, chopping onions, he imagines
steam rising from the old iron pot,
infusing the shadowy universe of disasters,
natural and human, with the small miracle
of homemade broth infused with vegetables.

He knows just how to hold the knife
of shining steel in his spotty, gnarled hands,
to feel the blade become strong and precise
under his fingers, to hear the crunch
of verdure on the scarred wooden cutting board,
to feel his hunched shoulders stiffen,
then ease, to dump the edibles into the pot,
atop the naked bird, decorating it
like an odd Christmas tree, then adding water
to cover it all.

The cook is elderly but not frail.
This is his way of banishing death,
watching finely diced greens take the shape
of wings in his cauldron of love.
He has spent a lifetime of labor
teaching Chaucer and Shakespeare.
Now, turning to humbler tasks,
he finds the humdrum of chopping celery
a new kind of life-giving force. Tired now,
he waits for everything to simmer
in the warm glow of afternoon, nodding off
to the baby’s voice uttering soup.

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