another poem - for wednesday's breakfast

 oatmeal

 i eat oatmeal for breakfast.
i make it on the hot plate and put skimmed milk on it.
i eat it alone.
i am aware it is not good to eat oatmeal alone.

its consistency is such that it is better for your mental health 

if somebody eats it with you.
that is why i often think up an imaginary companion to have

breakfast with.

possibly it is even worse to eat oatmeal with an imaginary companion. 

nevertheless, yesterday morning, i ate my oatmeal--porridge, as he

called it--with john keats.

keats said i was absolutely right to invite him: due to its glutinous

texture, gluey lumpishness, hint of slime,
and unusual willingness

to disintegrate, oatmeal should  not be eaten alone.

he said that in his opinion, however, it is perfectly ok to eat it wtih

an imaginary companion,

and he himself had enjoyed memorable porridges with edmund

spenser and john milton.

even if eating oatmeal with an imaginary companion is not as

wholesome as keats claims, still, you can learn something from it.

yesterday morning, for instance, keats told me about writing the

"ode to a nightingale."

he had a heck of a time with it--those were his words--"oi'ad

a 'eck of a toime," he said, more or less, speaking through his

porridge.

he wrote it quickly, on scraps of paper, which he then stuck in his

pocket.

but when he got home he couldn't figure out the order of the stanzas,

and he and a friend spread the papers on a table, and they made

some sense of them, but he isn't sure to this day if they got it right.

an entire stanza may have slipped into the lining of his jacket through

a hole in his pocket.

he still wonders about the occasional sense of drift between stanzas,

and the way here and there a line will go into the configuration of a 

moslem at prayer, then raise itself up and peer about, and then lay

itself down slightly off the mark, causing the poem to move

forward with god's reckless wobble.

he said someone told him that later in life wordsworth heard about

the scraps of paper on the table, and tried shuffling some stanzas

of his own, but only made matters worse.

i would not have known about any of this but for my reluctance to eat

oatmeal alone.

when breakfast was over, john recited "to autumn."

he recited it slowly, with much feeling, and he articulated the words

lovingly, and his odd accent sounded sweet.

he didn't offer the story of writing "to autumn," i doubt if there is

much of one.

but he did say the sight of a just-harvested oat field got him started

on it,

and two of the lines, "for summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy

cells" and "thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours," came

to him while eating oatmeal alone.

i can see him--drawing a spoon through the stuff, gazing into the

glimmering furrows, muttering--and it occurs to me:

maybe there is no sublime; only the shining of the amnion's tatters.

for supper tonight i am going to have a baked potato left over from

lunch.

i am aware that a leftover baked potato is damp, slippery, and

simultaneously gummy and crumbly,

and therefore i'm going to invite patrick kavanagh to join me.

by galway kinnell (from when one has lived a long time alone, 2016)