11-14-2021, 03:44 AM
Dinner is a crapshoot
here along the Tiber,
we weren’t invited to Trimalchio’s dinner-party
we were sucked in from the street
out of desperation
and mistaken for guests:
pork meatballs sprinkled with honey and poppy seed,
steaming hot sausages with plums and pomegranate seeds,
plump fowls, sows' udders,
and a hare with wings to look like Pegasus,
meat puppets of Marsyas made of little skin bottles
that let a peppery sauce go running over some fish,
which seemed to be swimming in a little channel,
then a zodiac of finger food:
chickpeas, a beefsteak, chicken testicles and kidneys,
African figs, a young Sow's udder, a cheesecake, a sea scorpion,
a sea bream with eyespots, a lobster.
Main course was a Trojan boar:
a wild boar stuffed with sausages
from its tusks dangle two baskets full of dates,
little piglets made of cake are all round as though at its dugs
and for dessert
baked apples with saffron honey,
saffron custard.
We’re not complaining.
The conversation kept us eating.
Where will we be sleeping?
Under a bridge, somewhere along the Tiber.
here along the Tiber,
we weren’t invited to Trimalchio’s dinner-party
we were sucked in from the street
out of desperation
and mistaken for guests:
pork meatballs sprinkled with honey and poppy seed,
steaming hot sausages with plums and pomegranate seeds,
plump fowls, sows' udders,
and a hare with wings to look like Pegasus,
meat puppets of Marsyas made of little skin bottles
that let a peppery sauce go running over some fish,
which seemed to be swimming in a little channel,
then a zodiac of finger food:
chickpeas, a beefsteak, chicken testicles and kidneys,
African figs, a young Sow's udder, a cheesecake, a sea scorpion,
a sea bream with eyespots, a lobster.
Main course was a Trojan boar:
a wild boar stuffed with sausages
from its tusks dangle two baskets full of dates,
little piglets made of cake are all round as though at its dugs
and for dessert
baked apples with saffron honey,
saffron custard.
We’re not complaining.
The conversation kept us eating.
Where will we be sleeping?
Under a bridge, somewhere along the Tiber.