Tempting Patience: On Cooking Oatmeal
the Old Fashioned Way
I want the
oatmeal to be a slow tar-pit bubble.
The tick of
heat beneath the pan,
the warm coil inside
the sky
of a damp morning
is a back and
back and back,
when men and
women lived
into their
hundreds of years, when
patience,
stewed like tough cuts
of meat, came to
its very end
in a raw red,
soft as a talked out jaw.
It’s guests who
show up at the close
of such a life with
their best perfected secret:
family cakes soaked
in just enough
lips-sealed
spike of cayenne and age-
cask bourbon
all centered on the pulled-
out-for-company
table.
Hasn’t some
small pearl has been
prevented when
it’s all so easy
and the grit’s
gone, when the husks and brans
have been removed
with machine precision
and we only
ever eat the germ?
How can we ever
be patience
when all we
ever have to wait for is
three minutes
instead of the thirty
five it takes for
the water
to boil and the
oats
to soak the
scant salt, the arrival of heat?
Even the fast
passage
from hand to
mouth is too brief. What
pray, had bored
us?
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