Jackhammer pangs of hunger stabbing
at the mind, we drag our depleted bellies through
late-night Chinatown, sniffing out meals
fit for gods but going for a song, no longer
confident of weathering the night
on an afternoon’s meager meal.
 
Fowls, all preened and shellacked, beckon
like centrefolds, and the lipstick red of roasted pork
smells almost like sex. Only the prices
give our purse the pause. Reasoning our bellies
down to humbler fare, we settle on
wanton noodles, exotic to you
at a reasonable three-fifty.
 
While we wait, the talk of things
spiritual, of Hesse and Hamsun, of the meaning
of hunger. Then my descant on the wanton,
an exegesis on the symbolic contours
of a dumpling. You look happy
with how the word means “cloud swallow”
or “swallowing clouds,” your last dollars spent
on something so exalted and filling
as the wanton. Then the arrival of the clouds
and we are enveloped, the talk dispersed
in the wanton heaven. Voluptuous meat wrapped
in thin veils of flour. Nothing spiritual.
Wanton is a wanton word. Still the clouds
dissolve like enlightenment’s flash, flushed
down to the lower regions, leaving the bowls
looking like immaculate blue skies.
 
Gracing the bill are two cookies.
Yours reads: “You are analytic, calm, able to reason
through the night of confusion.” All of which
we are decidedly not. Mine: “Long-absent friends
are soon coming back to you.” I am happy
with that, satisfied with the belated truth
of the forecast, thankful that a friend
whom I’d thought lost, held out her hand of peace
this morning. I am satisfied that the truth
will wait for us, James, in some Chinatown
ahead, that the clouds of some design
will gather us again for a wanton meal.
 
No better words said, no better
resolution made, than this tiny truth sealed
in flour to crown our last meal in Frisco,
before you go broke, and I head back east.