The Icelandic Canadian - 01.03.1994, Qupperneq 51

SPRING, 1994
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
16
POET'S CORMER
r^4
Jn
Kitchen
In this kitchen there is none of me a place of noise
and bad manners where the one son drinks his
leisure coffee listens to Tom Waits and Lou Reed on
the ghetto blaster reads Robert Priest’s The Mad Hand
and discusses Soviet astronauts’ conversations with
Alberta ham radio operators where the other son
brings the telephone discusses skateboard problems
with the rest of the world makes plans to sell one on
philosophical issues for the benefit of young minds
while eating bread where the mother in this case
me is usually silent wondering where all the minds at
the table are off to and following sometimes with pride
sometimes with suspension but wondering will I ever
write the poem let alone get my head together for the
novel I promised the Canada Council
this is just a family an average family of loves and
apprehensions not something you’d want to trade in
necessarily but a state of being and this kitchen is
mostly a place of meals I did not cook and floors I did
not sweep and pots I did not wash and shelves I did not
wipe and when I come home on library day after writer
in residencing it is a place of grease and chaos where
no hand has been except the noisy and ill mannered
one where food has been ripped from the cupboards
and torn into crumbs over tables and floors and
consumed in haste between urgent telephone convos
where I become the disconsolate army surgeon slowly
lifting broken items back into place and I must be
dreaming in this kitchen there is none of me
Ed. Note: Reprinted with the permission of Red Deer College Press
Ltd. Originally published in Kitchen Talk: contemporary women's
prose and poetry edited by Edna Alford and Claire Harris. Red
Deer Alta.: Red Deer College Press, 1992.