Poetry for Breakfast

You don’t have to be Catholic to eat symbolically

I’ve always thought if ghosts were real they’d be our depressions — the dent in the couch, the groove in the floor, the desktop’s finish worn away where you type. Life is routine and that has to leave some scratch, some way the world and its things get used. Every morning I pull on a pair of shorts, flip on the light above the stove, and fill the gooseneck kettle. If we’ve been away for even a few days, the stove hisses like it’s forgotten my kindness. I turn toward the coffee grinder — three scoops of beans — and let it chew while I retrieve a filter and set this little experiment in motion. Should some paranormal adventurer visit my house long after I’m dead they’d see these pathways, these obtuse triangles, scribbled all over the tile like a lifetime of signatures stacked together and ensouled on an overhead projector.

Until recently, this routine involved picking through whatever my phone had decided to try telling me over night, as well as the headlines that would dominate the day ahead. Part of the smartphone’s bargain seems to be how easily it attaches itself to everything we do, whether rote or unique — and with this ease, of course, the difficulty in detaching it, in putting it down. Even before last week, I realized my mornings deserved something better, so I picked up one of my favorite poetry collections, Averno, and read while the water dripped through the grounds. This is one of those practices every writer will tell you about at some point, a morning full of poetry. It’s the day at its quietest, the mind at its tenderest. There’s no one else lurking in the empty space on the page, which makes it all yours undisturbed — a secret cigarette or a walk through a park at dawn.

In my notebook, where I berate myself, I called this new aspiration “poetry for breakfast.” It began to feel like the best way to begin a day, which made me think of Bishop’s crumbs and coffee on a balcony:

At six o’clock we were waiting for coffee,
waiting for coffee and the charitable crumb
that was going to be served from a certain balcony,
— like kings of old, or like a miracle.
It was still dark. One foot of the sun
steadied itself on a long ripple in the river.

It is miraculous, that we eat — which is a metaphor and isn’t. Also a metaphor and not is the distinction we make between junk and nourishment, and how keenly we know, in our mind, which is which. Which isn’t to say there’s no place for junk; the reason we eat what’s bad for us is that it’s immensely pleasurable. But you know when your body and your mind, and especially your soul, needs something more.

You don’t have to be Catholic to eat symbolically, to see the will or affirmation in nourishment. This transubstantiation is what cigarettes do in Eileen Myles’ poetry, what the smell of manure does in James Wright’s, what men do in Sylvia Plath’s. It’s there, too, at the end of Bishop’s sestina:

My crumb
my mansion, made for me by a miracle,
through ages, by insects, birds, and the river
working the stone. Every day, in the sun,
at breakfast time I sit on my balcony
with my feet up, and drink gallons of coffee.

Maybe I’m hung up on gustatory metaphors because I’m also reading Dwight Garner’s wonderful memoir, The Upstairs Delicatessen. Perhaps the clichés about breakfast are true because it fortifies us; otherwise, Garner says, “We’re defenseless in the morning, most of us.” But eggs and sausage and rolls and oats and fruit — all of this “returns us to the tastes and sensations of tour toddlerdom, when we were most approved of by the world. ‘Feed me and love me,’ [Jenny] Diski wrote, ‘are virtually synonymous demands.’ Our mouths, when we are young, know what our minds do not.” A poem in the morning is your first bite of language, and what a bite. This is why we live here: What a reminder, that language is our home.

This sense of home, and leaving it, is maybe what’s so scary about death. I only hope that whatever trace we do leave won’t know it’s there, won’t know it lingers. Another poem:

That's what he felt, the lord of darkness,
looking at the world he had
constructed for Persephone. It never crossed his mind
that there'd be no more smelling here,
certainly no more eating.

Persephone, Glück writes, is “a smeller, a taster,” but in hell there is no nourishment, and, in death, no language. Having something to eat, as Garner writes, is the opposite: “This is a message that a meal always imparts: Life, for now, will go on.” I guess I’m reading what I’m reading every morning because I need language to go on. And it does.

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