Salad Days

For Micah Ruelle We were not green in judgment or cold in blood like Cleopatra in her youth who still was ordering chopped radish in her bowls back then, the hearts all gone to pieces next to the winter greens that in our days we never had use for so smitten were we with fire and ovens that I was gravy in judgment, which might not mean much unless you’ve taken a spoon of it and poured it back over a dumpling shaped like your heart so that it became even softer, something you could not have thought possible. It’s all happening now, you liked to say, and I agreed, though it was not the news from the outside I relished, but the daily Extra! Extra! the light of the morning brought to my attention every time we woke in your house or my house and my heart — salty, risen — was warm again in a way it hadn’t been for years. Organ of passion, organ of righteousness that has never had a single flavor cross its lips, how could you know how much I would miss the honey of those days, her drizzle of it on the turkey bacon, my cracking pepper up and down the pan, the sweet meat of happiness I would no longer let pass between our teeth.