At the Galway hotel breakfast bar
I can’t stop staring at the stack of toast
(think Inca temple) this guy is building,
what makes him snap, An Irishman needs his toast!
something I’ve been noticing actually,
how Ireland exalts toast, how it’s a link
to some peat-fired genetic memory—
the stooped mother in black over a hot stove
preparing that ace weapon in their everyday
war against dampness—Toast!—the word itself
warm, a call to celebrate with a speech,
drinks held high to one’s jolly good fellows.
It’s Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town
where I first saw the Beatles,
it’s an aging cornerback beaten again.
It’s what you’re warm as.
It’s the tip of your tongue making love
with the roof of your mouth each time
you say it, and it doesn’t matter
if we’re Irish or not, we come into
this world as wheat berries, we go out
as crumbs, and our life in the middle,
that’s the jam—Toast!—the first three letters
an anagram for Tao, in Lao Tzu’s words:
The harmony of one’s personal will
lining up with the justice of nature.
And upon my return to the states
I’m wild to join in this toast business,
to buy a toaster, a big-box cheapo
for working-stiff proletariat toast.
But after plugging it in, I find out
the thing emits an unblinking blue light,
the annoying beam of product overkill.
Even when I don’t want toast or I’m
even thinking of toast, there’s that light
in the kitchen like a corner-boy going,
“Yo, I got your toast right here,”
its blue so the hue of police lights.
There is no subtlety to this light
like there was with the faint green light
at the end of the dock in The Great Gatsby,
a glow that is argued about to this day—
was the glow for his love of money?
Was it the light that Daisy emitted?
But the blue light just stares. It holds no Tao,
no stooped mother, no justice of nature.
The diode eye is so the opposite of toast
something has to be done—that’s why Kathy
finds me on the floor with the toaster one night.
I have a hammer and a nail set.
I am Ulysses intent on justice,
and that one staring eye is you-know-who.
The blue light’s a blight on the nobility
of the Irish, warmth, Lao Tzu, Gatsby.
In the name of all that’s toast it must go.
