Like Tom Thomson safe in his studio
painting from Algonquin sketches,
I take lunch safe in my Toronto
with predictable maki rolled
behind a smiling counter.
I sip green tea from chipped
ceramic, poking at wasabi
squeezed into a coil like goose shit,
and scanning notepad scratches
made last week by a canal
between Kirkintilloch and Cadder:
The Stables, a restaurant,
a pub with aspirations,
Sauvignon Blanc on tap
and Chicken Arriata. Aye!
Scottish culture downed by gulps.
Lunching on the Forth and Clyde. Chicken Arriata. What is Chicken Arriata? Sauvignon Blanc. How civilized of an afternoon.
Arriata is a pasta, gluten–rich,
my lunch, a collision course
with dermatitis herpetiformis
and its tomato paste of rosy rashes.
What to do? What to do?
The waitress is sweet, the wine, dry.
Another sip or two will bring on a plan.
Rare sunlight refracts through the glass
and plays colours across the page
splayed beside my poisoned plate,
poetry by a man who knows better.
I don’t wish to give offense
so I swirl pasta into a ball
and slurp it down my gullet.
I cannot digest arriata. A knife clatters from the plate. A spontaneous selection. A fantasy of who I might be: a man, at café, at intersection of motorway and canal.
This vision of me, of a man
magnanimous, comes unravelled
like noodles from a fork.
“Is everything to your liking?”
“Very much so,” I lie and smile,
and, beneath her attentive eye,
slurp down another knot of goo.
This ever–becoming a man! Chicken Arriata. Now I must ask for the loo.
I will be polite, and suffer
for it later, waking in the night,
scratching, scratching, scratching.
Notes:
The situation that forms the narrative for this poem struck me as funny and inherently Canadian. I thought I’d be spontaneous and order something I’d never had before. But when the waitress delivered the dish, I realized I couldn’t eat it. The problem is dermatitis herpetiformis, a gluten allergy that leads to mindbending itchiness. Nevertheless, I didn’t want to offend the waitress and so ate some of the pasta she had delivered. However, the poem is not really about celiac disease, which is a rather boring topic. It’s more about the tendency many of us have to place the desire to please others above the imperative of self–care. This is more than a theoretical reflection about soft concerns; selflessness is a dangerous business that can unintentionally inflict psychic harm on the self and on others. I’ve tried to hint at the danger by framing the narrative with a reference to the painter, Tom Thomson, who died a possibly violent death in Algonquin Park more than 90 years ago.
