Milk
Celestial
glass bottles
on our daily
kitchen table.
Mystically delivered
while we were sleeping
to a metal box on the porch.
Waiting there at attention
for us like little popes
dressed in cream colored hats.
Cream risen
to the top
cloud thick
with a yellow sun
heartbeat.
Your choice:
either shake it
or get a spoon.
In winter sometimes they froze
and then the cream popped out
like Jesus from behind the stone
all ashimmer and sacred
as communion shared between us.
Real milk.
Whole milk.
Not that crap in the can
with its awful caramel taste
that my grandparents used.
Starvation artists,
my mother called them.
So that we noticed their bonyness,
the ridges in their fingernails
as they punctured the can
with an icepick,
the way they never spoke
to each other directly,
the hunch of their tired
shoulders over supper.
Evaporated.
Ugh, my father shrugged
and shook his head.
Ruins the coffee:
drip coffee they were proud of,
A & P Eight O'Clock's milky beige,
reminding them every day
that their lives were on a different track,
pouring out like that white elixir,
shoring them and their bones up for retirement
No. Their kids would be big and strong,
our legs as thick as tree trunks,
all because they spared us no expense
and always pushed the milk
at every meal.
And we gladly guzzled it down
with talk,
during fights
washing down peas and pork chops
drizzling it over oats
and advice, gulping
to ease the silence.
It filled us up.
During recess
we could look to mik for comfort
passed out in the form of little cartons with straws.
Cold and thick, it eased whatever hungers
had been aroused by what we were learning<
It wafted around us
in the playground at lunch time too
reborn as a waxy smell
from the incinerator,
which we gladly inhaled
thinking: weren't the cartons
burning up just like martyrs?
No one worried about butterfat content then.
this was the fifties counterweight
to two wars and a great depression.
We took pleasure where we could
and fat makes food taste good,
its deliciousness enhanced
by a sense of reckless abundance.
Never mind that we were too poor to join
the local Country Club, we had quart after
quart of hand-packed strawberry
Country Club ice cream.
And like dutiful soldiers we drank
to brace ourselves for the future,
teeth clicking against the glass edge.
Until it threatened to turn us into giants.
Now here we are on the altar of middle age:
a bunch of fatted calves,
like milky dumplings
floating in the stew of that false hope,
buying our 1%
because Skim
is just too thin
and God forbid
too blue.
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