Mazurka Beans

I look down into a pot of beans, shaking oregano,
sunlight shines through the trees and fills the house,
the music of Chopin Mazurkas fills the air,
spilling out the open door diffusing into the streams of light.

I look down into a pot of beans – black beans –
the food of Cuba, of Puerto Rico,
the dish I loved my mother to make.
Below the carpet of basil, oregano, paprika, cumin, salt and pepper,
the black beans soak, their skins browned in garlic olive oil,
mingling with chopped ham and onions,
caressed by diced stewed tomatoes,
all blending into a nectar of the earth,
a nourishment, a celebration, an essence of a culture –
sabor.

I look down into that textured herbal blanket
waiting to see the eruption of bubbles signaling a boil,
a brown boil with blood red flashes rending the herbal shroud
and issuing billows of aromatic steam,
the taste of the south like the spirit of its people –
rising, rising –
to overwhelm with luxuriant sensuality
the thin dryness of a pallid north.

I look down into that pot of black beans in this perfect moment
and I see the entire world radiating out –
the entire interpenetrating web
created and unfurled beyond the edges of infinity –
like the eightfold rays of Buddha truth,
flung from the vortex-eye of a Tibetan sand mandala.
Time evaporates, mind is one, “I am who am.”

Outside, I hear my little girl,
babbling and toddling like a little sparrow sifting through the leaves,
as purple florets of lantana sway in the mazurka breeze – music,
the kiss that transcends time,
the breath that transcends death –
and little Ella’s arrow gaze and impish smile
are my eternal rebellion’s salute to a narrow sleeping world.

I am the pepper in your pot of beans,
the heat rising from below,
the browned garlic olive skin rubbing up against you,
the nectar blended from many fine extracts and cultivations,
heir of an ancient and unending impetus,
the innocence and adventure of eternal experience –
an enticement, a flood –
the love-child of revolution and sustenance –
sabor.

19 May 2001

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