Poetry Corner: Beauty Consumed

You don't visit Austin so much as eat your way across it
gathering as people do around picnic tables
for the most amiable of meals
and conversations
about

things like you remember from holiday meals with family
reconstituted specifically for the occasion
when months of life and living
needed recounting
for all

with recollections of laughter and tears made more fluid
not only by the uncorked and uncapped
as by butter and roux
made thick

by the artist who was hidden by pans and clouds of heat
whose own satisfaction is the sated
palate and empty plate of
others

which reminds us as God may be Father Son and Holy Spirit
and all those other gilded holy monograms
before that and other things,
God cooks.

- Philip Carr-Jones