greatpoetry | A Meal by Margaret Atwood (Reply)

A Meal
by Margaret Atwood

We sit at a clean table
eating thoughts from clean plates

and see, there is my heart
germfree, and transparent as glass

and there is my brain, pure
as cold water in the china
bowl of my skull

and you are talking
with words that fall spare
on the ear like the metallic clink
of knife and fork.

Safety by all means;
so we eat and drink
remotely, so we pick
the abstract bone

but something is hiding
somewhere
in the scrubbed bare
cupboard of my body
flattening itself
against a shelf
and feeding
on other people's leavings

a furtive insect, sly and primitive
the necessary cockroach
in the flesh
that nests in dust.

It will sidle out
when the lights have all gone off
in this bright room
(and you can't
crush it in the dark then
my friend or search it out
with your mind's hands that smell
of insecticide and careful soap)

In spite of our famines
it keeps itself alive

: how it gorges on a few
unintentional
spilled crumbs of love