Fiction

These the colors & these the shapes I wish for every meal.  For every poem.  A meal and a poem share one thing -- a palette.  Nature is never unsure of its canvas.  Never untruthful.  Although a trick of the eye is always welcomed.

And breakfast, you ask?  Toasted walnut bread with a drizzle of olive oil and abundant slices of Fuyu persimmons.  Why this abundance?  Getting ready to celebrate my friend Kim's birthday.

Sweeping

Weather is serious and San Francisco takes fog to its bosom.  Nestled as a cat for some serious snoozing. Yet our fog (yes, it's personal) comes in a sweep and rarely stays through two meals. Our fog at its most lengthy is a sonnet.  Never an epic.  What's for dinner?  Something warm & fragrant to sweep away the chill.  Perhaps, roasted eggplant, tomatoes, Parmesan, garlic. Crustless.

Grandifolia

Sometimes the sign says it all.  A recipe for wonder as I again wander San Francisco's Botanical Gardens.  And later wonder how to combine a couple of vegetables/fruits with goat cheese on a thin crust of pizza.  When sun sets, what poem might wander unto a page left open for wonder?

String beans

Edible?  You go first.
Senna from SF Botanical Gardens.
November in San Francisco.
A picnic lunch -- brie, crusty fragrant bread, persimmon & a few cherry tomatoes.  Quite the feast.
More than a haiku; perhaps, less than a sonnet.  An epic of taste & sight.

High up

or close up.  Easy to miss.  But once seen!  Yes, this is a flowering dahlia tree.  Dahlia being San Francisco's official flower.  Brief blooming season.  Like cranberry beans -- brief and beautifully
hued.  And remember San Francisco's Botantical Garden is the finest farmers markets for blooms, for words, and the eyes' appetite.  Bon appetite!  A colorful golden beet pizza for dinner, should you ask.

Solid

Solid as a squash, as a petite pumpkin.  What could be more so?

Not if the cat is involved.  Yes ever the seemingly stationary, moves.

Or is it the cat who moves?

Why contemplating physics at work,
work to be done in the kitchen.

Cut, seed, slice one of these beauties to the left.  Yes, toast the seeds.  Roast the slices with a drizzle of olive oil.  No matter what anyone has told you, the skins -- once roasted -- are delicious.  And the flesh, divine.  Ask any poem waiting for a taste.

Brevity

Such a brief bloom.  Just the time it took to savor morning tea.  The bloom spent, except in memory. This is the second and looks like the last of the cactus' blooms.  What joy to witness.  I'm thinking of all the sweet & savory bits to life that are brief. Many, many.  As many as words in many brief poems.  Or a table laden with tapas.

Meanwhile, in another room, haiku the beloved cat is sunning himself on the window sill behind the fruiting prickly pear. The window offers back his sweet face to me.

Reflections are brief gifts.  Time loves the circular.