The
pot dwarfed the stove. My ex's brother-in-law
said his grandfather banged it out
ninety years ago
in Peru, a copper alloy, the old man's name scrawled
on the side. The pot
dwarfed the freaking stove,
enough
seafood chowder to feed Pizarro's army,
or at least Eduardo,
his wife, myself, my ex's
sister, Matt her boyfriend (replacing my buddy Ben),
my daughter and her cousin,
a cilantro-heavy dish,
a
burbling green sea of shrimp and octopus
and crab and corn and onions,
and keep the potatoes coming,
whose name in Spanish meant
Bringing
Back the Dead,
though I preferred to think of it as Bringing a Little Peace
to
Various Warring Factions,
Some No Longer Related.
The pot dwarfed the stove, shaped as it was
like those plastic
dishes
they strap on wounded dogs,
its maw a chasm in the Andes, out of which they crawled,
the Incas or their
forebears,
the first in those high reaches
to fashion spears of copper, when my ex's family
was young and speared
each other
only, long before
skewering hapless gringos became the favorite sport
of the women, long
before
the family drifted down
to Lima by the sea, where a young man grabbed a hammer
and fashioned pots of
copper
to fill with yummy critters.
The pot dwarfed the stove, its dents and dings and scratches
a
kind of cuneiform
speaking of bowed heads
and the kind of soulful grunting
predating
any language,
the earliest sort of prayer,
shut up, let’s eat, amen.