Charlie Brown: Someday, we will all die, Snoopy.
Snoopy: True, but on all the other days, we will not.
– Charles Schultz
We don’t know how lucky we are till we’re old
Someday we’ll die, but on all the other days, we won’t
How lucky I was
The cheap, unremarkable pension
Its creaky bedsprings
The untroubled sleep of a young woman in Provence with her mother
Le petit dejeuner served at long tables in a dim room
Though we knew out the narrow windows all of Arles was waking
under its blue dome of sky
The tang of freshly stewed apricot preserves
phosphorescent on the table between us
A basket of fat croissants
brown, flaked, sun-scorched
smelling of butter and earth
In each mouthful the hum of a cow, a distinctly French cow
philosophical, intellectual, marveling
In each munch of grass
the whole cornucopia of existence
Everything in this world–the grass, the salt, the fat–
rising to the top
My mother across the table from me
humming with the sheer pleasure of it
Her blue eyes
burning through clouds of steam from our cafes au lait
as they somersaulted and disappeared joyfully upwards into the dome
The cathedral of summer, of possibility, of apricots ripening in the orchard
The peasant women Van Gogh painted washing their bedclothes in the Rhone
always and forever washing their bedclothes in the Rhone
The white sheets we’d slept in already scrubbed
and rippling on the rooftop like sails
Going everywhere, going nowhere
It was morning, it was breakfast
We were eating light and earth
Drinking deep from bowls of uprisingness
The day cupped in our hands
Each bite eternal, planetary
As if we could break bread with the sun
Hold an entire season in the arc of our lucky, outstretched arms
Quite certain now that someday we will die
But on all the other days, we won’t
Posted with kind permission of the poet.
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