Poet's Choice

By ROBERT PINSKY
Sunday, November 18, 2007

The ceremonious gathering to eat sumptuous food is a basic ritual, involving memory and family or communal ties. The holiday of Thanksgiving in that sense is primal, as well as American. Mark Strand's New Selected Poems includes an evocation of food's deep meanings, appropriate to the holiday, though the dish is not turkey:

Pot Roast

I gaze upon the roast,

that is sliced and laid out

on my plate,

and over it

I spoon the juices

of carrot and onion.

And for once I do not regret

the passage of time.

I sit by a window

that looks

on the soot-stained brick of buildings

and do not care that I see

no living thing -- not a bird,

not a branch in bloom,

not a soul moving

in the rooms

behind the dark panes.

These days when there is little

to love or to praise

one could do worse

than yield

to the power of food.

So I bend

to inhale

the steam that rises

from my plate, and I think

of the first time

I tasted a roast

like this.

It was years ago

in Seabright,

Nova Scotia;

my mother leaned

over my dish and filled it

and when I finished

filled it again.

I remember the gravy,

its odor of garlic and celery,

and sopping it up

with pieces of bread.

And now

I taste it again.

The meat of memory.

The meat of no change.

I raise my fork

and I eat.

(Mark Strand's poem "Pot Roast" can be found

in his book "New Selected Poems." Knopf.

Copyright 2007 by Mark Strand.)