Beefsteak

July 10 2019

A bread knife works best.

Its serrated edge sharpened

by drawing it slowly over the whetstone

with a gentle touch,

just the weight of the blade

resting lightly against

the hard pebbled rock.

The verb, as well as the noun,

it knifes cleanly through

the ripe round tomato

so barely any liquid is lost.

Until the sound of tempered steel

rasping across

the heavy wooden cutting-board,

well-burnished and worn

and intricately scored

by so many knives before,

gorgeously stained

by the juice of a thousand tomatoes.

It sits face up, rocking slightly,

deep red pulp

and rosy-yellow liquor

laced with small gilded seeds

glistening

in the incandescent light,

a homegrown tomato, freshly plucked.

Like snowflakes

each centre-cut tomato

is exquisitely unique,

a cross-section

exposing the inner world

of a still-living thing.

Its red

is the definitive version

against which all other reds are compared.

Its smell is tomato,

a mix of floral, acid, sweet.

And its flesh is umami,

slightly carnal, savoury, beef.

Quarter it, with the same honed blade

drawn lightly through its meat.

Slip a slice between my lips,

savouring it slowly

eyes shut.

This is a form I love returning to, and often do: microcosm, and close observation. I think this is really the essence of the poetic sensibility, a mindset that requires you slow down, take notice, surrender to your physical senses, and let the world come to you with as little preconception as possible. If anyone is to pay attention to the cliched dictum “slow down and smell the roses”, it has to be poets. Maybe because we aren't expected to do anything useful. And because we have the freedom to write at length or at short, to end the lines where we choose, and to try to see the world as if for the first time.