Getting the Eggplant Right

 

Behind me, wooden chest of magic spells
on yellowed three by five inch index cards:
the shorthand fashioned for my mother’s eyes,
the understood directions left unsaid.

Before me, blackness verging into purple
and plumped out to the skin, the mystery
of eggplant thumped against my fingernail.
I guess I have utensils for the job.

Within me the uncertainty that comes
of inexperience, and deeper down,
the doubt - magicians work their spells,
and all through childhood I’d been witness to
my mother’s magic. How could I presume
to do myself what only she could do?

Her cooking had observed the unities
as classically as Aeschylus: it looked,
smelled, tasted, satisfied all of a piece,
and nourished me as well. Like little else
encountered in this world, in every way
it was exactly what it seemed to be.
My buddies, lingering at mealtimes, knew.
I always counted myself blessed at birth.

My mother had been gone for seven years
before I thought to try her recipes;
I‘d long since given up those tastes for dead,
as irretrievable as Christmas in 
the Fifties. I’d provided for myself
for decades (cooked for women, too, the ones
whose generation thought it servitude
instead of celebration), but against
my mother’s standard what I did in haste
could never qualify as genuine.
“Some people eat to live,” she used to say,
“While others live to eat.” It was her art.

I stood over the trimmed medallions, salt
shaker in hand, and watched the sweat bead up,
then patted them with paper towels, dipped
in egg and breadcrumbs, lightly fried to dark
oak color, layered in a baking dish
with thin cut slabs of ropey mozzarella,
alternating milky white and brown,
then drowned in the tomato red, a sauce
smelling of crushed herbs and hard grated cheese.

A trip to the pre-heated oven then,
where, covered, it could bubble up at will.
The volume of the kitchen filled with warmth,
aroma, and the melody of hope.

You’ll call it ordinary sorcery
to get the eggplant right. What one may do
another may repeat. Ingredients,
insensible, can’t recognize the hand
that shapes and chooses them. The laws of heat,
anonymous, work on in no one’s name -
there is no magic touch. At best, we are
the agents of the urge that brings to being
according to the way things have to be.  

But taste it. Tell me that it’s not the same
as when I came in after playing ball
until it got too dark, the week before
we kids went back to school. Or you can say
that anyone could make it taste this way.
Think what you want - or taste the truth again.

How does the universal work on earth
except by way of local blessings? How
does it choose its agents? I don’t know;
I claim no special virtue, for my mother
or for me, but after what has sprung
from her hands and from mine, I know we share
a closeness now we never could before.

And while the song of eggplant in the mouth -
a chime that’s come to many - patiently
can wait to be repeated, rung anew
in people not yet born, I lift a fork
and in a bite my childhood lives again.
After the years of hopelessness, I find
what I recover pierces to the root.