Bowl of Clams in New Taipei City

Bowl of Clams in New Taipei City

Beside the oil-licked gutter, fragrance abounds

as the woman chops the fresh Pei Tsai while flirting with entrants,

whittling the stem and fanned backs of the vegetables like a massage,

thrust as love with each chop and cut and rearrangement.

This open-to-the street room, with seats surrounded by a field of fecund clacking,

passes another day of memory making and language preparing and upending.

But this is only the beginning.

There is abundance in the spread of this place,

the scooters hawking between traffic, the grandmothers towing their red and blue bags,

the gossip that weeds between the sharing of spoons dishing out poached fish and peanut,

the diesel air as heavy as the morning's humid storm, the speed of the slurp of noodles,

and the child's cry swallowed up in the swell of bitter melon and red pepper.

But this is only the beginning.

Then suddenly, wreckage comes from afar

pounding up like a rogue wave without some demonstrable racket,

a small, pin-point soundlessness that for a brief instant halts the scent and the sentences,

the backing of the pots and the clicking of the smiles,

and there is only silence but the stinging is immediate.

This cannot be the ending.

And in that instant that has the force to stop the spin of the bustling around

the world tilts ever so slightly and each person dials and searches for the eruption:

a glass of water tipped over and bowing on its long-side sounding in circles,

a dropped bowl of garlic steamed clams, aquatic splintering in small bites and yelps,

a pair of dropped chopsticks falling to the cement with a sharp cry,

like cats mating behind the delivery truck,

the tureen of hotpot tipped over slightly, enough to burn the businessman in the corner,

or was it something more heart-tender:

the pulpy slap upon the cheek of a lover that fired up from some raging or revelation.

And there in that room and along that street and throughout that city, for tug of a moment,

the world became inarticulate.

But this is not the ending.

For in that eatery silence, a running began

a palpable swaying toward a healing and reconciliation

the pulling-back-together of the stitching of life and noise and eating,

whether utensil or cuisine or partnership or nation.

For in that abrupt silence the heart grew a tap or two stronger,

the cook, the crying child, the waitress, the business men, the grandmother, the cornered lovers, the teenager smoking as if an idol.

Each of them realized that this was not an ending.

For through the shortness of breath came a wider range of heart,

and the sky was carving and the bone chafing and the all of it,

the arrangements and the defining,

became loud and boisterous and eloquent in its becoming.

And the bowl of garlic clams and Mung bean and Pak Choi and Garland Chrysanthemum

stayed in front of us and we ate

and the love that perched between us as we picked up our fallen chopsticks

became our resumption.

And that was our beginning.