They took him hollow. Tethered to him sinking they tread easily on strong legs. They buoy his weight. Without them he would sink with that dense hull pulling him down further and further until pressure caved his vessel in a fatal loss of integrity. They put him in the car and drove. He did not see where and never quite remembered how the table and chairs appeared the napkins and tablecloths the twinkling lights and sundry glassware. His mother across and brotherdad alongside his eyes are tired and red limbs all weak and trembling on current with no engine. Glasses fill sturdy columns of perspiring water holding throughout their constant sip and pour. Balloons of wine fill with barolo or sangiovese or nero d’avola or dolcetto or lambrusco or malbec or nebbiolo or garnacha or tempranillo wines whose pleasure in the mouth their intoxication and spreading warmth begins in word in the terrific shape of their names. And then plates begin to fill. There is bread. A matrix of warm little caves you can break into edible parcels of shelter from the inside out. Loaves pocked with wondrous wandering caverns as if in their very bodies are displayed what came before before ten thousand years of civilization built on ground grain and controlled fire and tamed wild yeasts and yoked plowing animals. Home you can carry and eat dipped in the same rich grassy peppery olive oils that lit the night and sanctified the unclean and preserved and fueled his line of people going back and back and back in a dizzying line of ever expanding cloud galaxies of human family. There is butter. The milk of mothers across species and planes of existence dressed liberally in salt drawn from the earth and ocean the conduit of all electric flavor and brother to the very iron of his blood. The grounded circuit of father earth. Exquisite hues then crunch and slip in radicchio musclun rocket and rapini. Every bite growing to encompass the wholeness of forest and field each fired bud thumbs through page after page of jumbled archives in his mind files of tarragon spinach rose rosemary chive garlic collard mustard kale shiso lambsquarter flowered cilantro jasmine oregano bay thyme juniper and on and on and on. There comes a dish like a black forest of spongy mushroom. It is in all aspects the mossy beds every wet indian summer autumn forest has offered him in cool comforters of springtime meadow love. It is the maybe never happened memory that has always assured him again and again you are always home and it lies before him on a perfectly round ceramic braced with fork and knife. There comes a braised short rib off brother bull. The sort sacrificed to appease god sure but mostly to feed ships of visiting guests and villages of triumphant family. Short ribs. He sees the anatomy work behind his eyes as his tongue melts into throat. Short ribs. More susceptible to flex and break than the harder longer upper cage because they do not protect the heart. He consumes them. He drinks the wines and then the rich syrups of tawny and ruby port and tempered sugar sauces and grows drowsy on pillows of panna cotta cream and chocolate. He balances warmly into some very real place of strong and bitter but contained and manageable and frankly delicious wealth embodied as delicately foamed ristretto in demitasse. There is familial embrace through it all the whole meal a tightly wound hug like a fist and it persists still the hold of them always there their tread and buoy never untangling from his vessel . Even nowadays years on and more away from that hollow place of need it is a sort of love worth weeping over like perfect middle morning rain.
