David Capps

Kitchen Horizon

Someone left the faucet on: water drips into the metal basin’s shield, each splash, amplifying, bursts into smaller lashes, too small to collect in the drain, too small to bother with, like names of gladiators who shrank from a fight unremembered, they sink from their spiral jetty, evaporate in the ring.

Someone’s rocks rest on that little platform by the dish soap, smoky quartz and geodes, a flat skipping rock with a chip on the edge that must have seemed on someone’s travels to look like the Virgin Mary, inwardly glowing in two-toned light. If they fall into the metal basin someone picks them up and returns them to their place. What more could be expected?

By the sink there is a dishwasher never used, as someone prefers to hand wash dishes, to feel the grit under nail, the point at which oil turns to water whirlpools down the drain. Someone remembers summers and endless feelings, the slip of watermelon seed through fingers, the oblong goings through of digestive tracts and treatises. The many small reasons consumed in the space of an afternoon appear again as seeds in the space of the kitchen sink where there is a dish unwashed.

Dishtowel one and dishtowel two ruffle on the counter near where the coffee grinder has made its marks, now one now the other in tow, so that the counter’s stain becomes their stain, familial. The coffee grinder’s placid rim says otherwise than to admit soft agitations. Someone who always leaves coffee grounds on the table ought to know.

Upright passengers in their plastic motorcade, forks and knives in the dish rack gently drip dry on a day like any other day. The spoon someone once stole from a roommate eases back from its slug of peanut butter jars, hugs and honeys, dressings and coffee dressage. Plates and bowls like peony petals spill over all, without the least care of someone’s vengeful motives.

Fruit flies over the rim of the kitchen garbage: massed particles, bodies plump, discoveries, intrinsic attractions, unpredictable patterns of flight. Someone thinks they may have evolved recently to be faster, crazier, to represent the mind’s irreversible abandonment, the body’s haphazard ascendancies through skeins of orange peel and green tops of strawberries lopped clean by the paring knife someone let fester.

Knobby heads of cabinets touched as if a religious service they had opened reveal someone’s contradiction, pure in the face of conspiracy, inner darkness welcomed into light, cool places of grain and flour given to gradual warmth, someone has become the high priestess of a ceremony which clarifies human and divine time, while cabinets remain to contemplate along what third track human time moves against divine, what quick theft reaching in and grabbing what is sought retracts in never light unthinkingly.

The refrigerator’s electric hum recalls flat fields where pylons stood at attention and in the nearby house someone slept, bones growing, oblivious to the electric hum, the wires tensed where crows perched watching flat fields, and the railroad tracks, and the cancer forming, and the red brick chimney of a nearby house of someone who was just a boy.

Seconds from bed, if someone had a nightmare, the kitchen fridge can crack open, equipped with its own pale light. As the sirens blare outside there is enough milk left in the carton for one glass. Footsteps in the middle of the night with age diminish. The uncanny gazes of dishes in the sink wander. Mobius strips. Someone will do them later that should have this morning that should have last night. A little dried crumb worked onto the back of an ant into vast networks of procrastination. Call him Bilious Tom of the Carpenter whose cat calls him Play-mit Space Invader.

The kitchen match is dying, but wants more than anything to be known as the Blue, or the Great Blue, a whale covetous of the ocean, magnesium tip extended, its wooden skeleton a prow dipping through hand-struck air, to be a match in blazing flamedom, not some flame-dumb dust stick in the junk drawer, or an oar adrift on the countertop’s white expanse, but released from someone’s use.

Outlets dot the walls perpendicular to the countertop, the prongs’ two eyes and a nose are a smile for someone’s small appliances, crockpot or coffee grinder, blender or toaster, are similes plugs must provide for assurance that all is well; that there have been no storms, outages, fires, nor has someone’s electricity been inexplicably turned off. A smile can mean infinite hope.

From within sleeping stands, summer strands of thickened wheat, bitters of memory retreat,

inaudible harmonies of iridescent, minor detours, to press, to let rest the rest of dregs, stained legs of whole ground hordes, bored French press sustained on being bored, breadless lord someone who raises his contraption, red-eyed as of mind his overlord, within what mind slowly settled, slowly most of all mid-fall, when to pour a water over grounds sets a will in motion.

Words fall all around like rain, snow, leaves describe as fleeing from a mouth, sloshing a mouth feel. An abandoned cottage weathers the seasons; it still resembles a cottage, though the door hangs off its hinges and snow fills the sink. Think of the dust mites and silverfish families above cabinets; ash rains down amid laughter in the apartment next to someone’s, laughter, temporary residence of human growth: a cough, a cry, a door slamming muffled in night’s umpteenth lock—who knew someone could be so close, standing on the kitchen counter.

The ceiling lights above the kitchen horizon are not the sun, nor is the kitchen horizon a horizon; if not for the flat wooden cutting board they would not be on, nor would you, whoever you are to someone, whatever you mean to someone, be visible.

The crockpot scent of oxtail settles. Here there is no need for doors.

David Capps is a philosophy professor and writer based in CT.