Eating at the Cederholm Roadside Café
I wonder whose mouth this fork last visited,
whose coffee this spoon has recently stirred.
Beyond whose teeth did this fork unburden
its salad cargo of vegetal nutrition, on whose
tongue did it rest for the pleasure of taste
before swallowing toward ultimate waste.
I pick off a dried fleck of parsley, open wide
for a speck of meat speared on a tine
and imagine the last person to dine
was there for reasons exactly like mine.
Did the chewing chawing mandibles belong
to a long distance trucker with a haul of pet parakeets,
or a traveling evangelist giving voice to the Paraclete*,
or a woman from the West driving east for a holiday
who noticed at noon she needed to eat.
The common need of a highway of strangers
we all got hungry and needed to feed.
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*Holy Spirit as counselor