Macaroni & Cheese (the poem)

Macaroni & Cheese

A C augmented chord huffing autumn thru a 12-button accordion

          when

the evenings are guinea hen gray

                                            we have seen so much & forever is so

short a time really the gusts coming down off Council Mountain full of

geese & swans & now it’s March & you said

“You’re making a white sauce,” incredulously because I didn’t know

          any better

Yellow marimba mallets bouncing down a chromatic bass line the

          willow

tree you showed me where to plant is grown into goldfinches chirping

          all May—

6 tablespoons of butter melting in a copper pot with

                                            flour black pepper paprkia

the willow’s leaves the china jade & honey agate rosary beads the

tree of life—time is moving chromatic & crisp & hollow

along the wooden keys—“Dreaming on clouds of butter fat” you said—

Something about our life & the recipes found in a 1933 Fannie Farmer

Cookbook is both the same & alien—whisking the roux & the white

          white

sky in July the smoke from the Snake River valley fires

inexorable as a freight train crossing Oregon

                                            as things breaking down

inside & 3 cups of milk which can be 2% fat if you wish

& things breaking down inside the body that is—the milk & flour

thickening in the whisk—a syncopated flute solo starting on low

E recalling how Yellow-headed Blackbirds

                                            sing guttural & vanish

“Is it really 6 cups of grated cheese?” you asked, astonished.

Yes I said yes & I meant it everlasting i.e. a lifetime is how many years the chokecherries scarlet in autumn the frozen fog sculpting the

          willow in

December the juncos foraging for seeds across the deck a layer of

macaroni (cooked al denté 1st – a layer of cheese—a layer of macaroni topped with cheese & white sauce—repeat—the stoneware

          pot baked at 400 roughly

45 minutes—you know when it’s done when you see it—

                                            I’ve said everything I meant

to say to you—a bowed bass trembling against your body—I’ve really

          said nothing

Jack Hayes
© 2010