Sketches of the Restaurant

The restaurant dark in the busy morning holds up to its window its napkin headstones, shining silverware and wineglass moons, and dreams of the dinner hour, a bright river of diners unfolding their longings –  for cooks, for waiters, for each other to pour their longing into, for God; it is overflowing with the pure attention of diners, ready to pour them like the songs of Schubert out into the world.

The restaurant silent in the bright morning is ignorant of sparkle. It does not glitter like minerals in the sidewalk catching the sun. Think of those crystals deep in the earth and risen like flowers at last or stony truths to dance in the light –  for a moment everything in the world has had the light and time it needs. But the restaurant is dark; it hunches itself into a cave where a black round something too large to hover is hovering, an insect? A sybil hanging in a cave chanting her old lament? –

No one could hear the song entire and its grief.

I said it clearly as I could without the truth falling away like petals that are too much handled,

truth the only waking thing I touched or saw, my only flower

though my dreams were yielding green, hazy with pollen and

   day’s-end heat.

–  A round black insect hanging in the breeze dancing, drunk with pollen? –

They pondered my choice of words but I never saw a choice,

only much later sometimes the beginnings, flames unfolding like          hands,

waiting to know if it was the world on fire or myself, some old itch of    my old body

come rudely to light where a seam of the bone-sack rubbed the bones.

One after one I became them; I was lost in the crowd, river of dots

I was hollowed out with faces, a hollow, singing tree.

They pecked at my words each searching for where his true story         begins

but no one listened to the song and its whole grief.

 – A bumblebee nuzzling the flowers in the orange heat of autumn? No, a foreigner lost in the crowd coming from the train who cannot follow directions, who has grown round with all the directions she has tried, until she gives up all directions and begins to feel something, could it be happiness?

But the restaurant is blind as a herring with the scales still shielding its eyes from the salt bustle of the sea, like that poet on the end of the bench over there with his notebook and coffee trying to pull the night’s dream back out of the dye-pot unchanged, saying to himself, Just one whole thing, noticing nothing.

Patrick Daly