everyday object. That labor and its final product are not only unappreciated, but sacred, as this striking passage makes clear:
. . . I don’t have the shoulders
to churn that butter, or the hands to give it its texture.
It is only in feeling a bar begin to melt beneath
my warm grip, like a muscle grown weak,
that I realize how far I am from butter, the work
it takes to make that butter. The kind of work
that is holy like butter. Not water-into-wine work,
but real work, hard work, work we can be grateful exists
if for no other reason than the joy that comes
when it’s done. I want to taste that holiness,
so I pull a pat of nickel-thick butter stuck to the flat edge
of the blade and drop it on my tongue.
If there are poems in praise of work, there are poems in praise of simple communication as well. The denizens of The Dining Room are sealed off by silence from the wider world; how fitting, then, that “The Milk Rule” captures a moment of perfect communication, without a word being spoken:
As I reach over
a man to give him
one small cup of milk,
he grabs me
just above the elbow,
just below the wrist,
slips his drug-black gums
around my forearm.
A harmless beast
pretending to eat,
he snarls at my skin,
slimes me with a mixture
of spit and scraps
of half-chewed,
broiled meat.
Drawing laughter rather than blood, the beast “howls with delight,” breaking through his silence, and the wall that separates him from the rest of society. Some might read this as an example of dining with indignity, though any moment of shared humanity, however fleeting, has its grace.
Indeed, there is an abundance of grace and hope in these poems, even where despair would be the expected response. In the poem, “Manny,” the poet conjures a world where all things are possible, because something “impossible” has actually occurred:
Manny got a job today. After nine months
of pushing peas around his plate, eyes he could not
bear to lift, Manny got a job today.
Manny could be a character in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, burdened by the “pipe dream” of the life he once had, or could have again. Yet, in an in environment as full of human suffering as Harry Hope’s saloon, Manny—and the poet—refuse the sedative of despair. Instead, the poem invokes the logic of miracles. If Manny could get a job, then, it follows, this could be:
. . . the day the fear coiled in Doyle’s mind lifts
like smoke rings and fades, the day he forgets
his wife’s bones he put above a fire. This could be
the day Jay’s machine-gun gibberish becomes prayer
or poetry, praise or warning, the day the tank in his throat
cranks its belts into the soft pulses of a baritone,
the day he learns to sing. This could be
the day the scar that halves Marva’s face unzips,
the day her albino eye flushes its gray and glimmers,
warm with brown and sight again, the day the right side
of her face sits on the throne of her skull . . .
With this cascade of miraculous images, so vividly imagined, the poet moves from witness to visionary, expressing the sure knowledge that a vision of the impossible, expressed in the language of the possible, must precede any great change, personal or political, intimate or global. By poem’s end, she envisions a world, where, paradoxically, The Dining Room goes out of business, not due to government cutbacks or the myopic refusal to raise taxes, but because such “soup kitchens” are no longer necessary. The “silver stays in drawers.” This could be:
The day the doors are boarded up, the day the Closed sign is hung.
Manny got a job today. Yes, Manny got a job today.
Fittingly enough, Psalms of The Dining Room ends with a poem called, “Prayer.” This is a poem of thanksgiving, thankfully free of any reference to the gluttonous holiday of that name and, once again, a true psalm. Cleaning up tables, the poet discovers a scrap of paper left behind by a patron, promising to pray for her. The first reaction is incredulity: “Pray for me? Pray for me?”
Using this reaction as a point of departure, the poem takes flight. “Pray for me” becomes an incantatory phrase—the poet has a particular gift for anaphora—and a plea for compassion, not only in the world but within the self:
. . . Because the first thought of my day
is hunger, pray for me that I eat. But pray for me that I know
hunger, pray for me. Pray for me that I feel myself
in the growl of your belly, that I am more like you
than I remember, pray for me.
As the poem begins to soar, there is a remarkable synthesis: it speaks in the voice of both the suffering human being and the human being who provides relief from suffering, the compassionate one and the one in need of compassion:
. . . Pray for me that I am
the blind man because the room knows to make room for him.
People move tables, chairs, themselves, part a path for him as if
he were a king. But pray for me that I make way, pray for me.
( . . . )
. . . Pray for me that I am
the pregnant girl who is allowed a second plate. Pray that I know
the power I hold in my body, for a tiny king can grow eyes
in my body, please pray. Pray for me that I am the man
in this same room, seated at
