Setting the Table in the Age of Reason

By Christine L. Adams

A celebration in verse of the beauty of everyday life through the examination of common objects and one's relationship to them, as evidenced by memory, observation, and the senses.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Propertius Press
• Release date: May 14, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224617357

Christine L. Adams

Christine Adams, whose work has appeared in Litchfield Magazine, The Red Wheelbarrow and at CtHistory.org, among others, is a development coordinator for a Connecticut land trust. She celebrates the connective beauty of nature and historic places, and is active in the preservation and conservation movement in her historic town. Through her poetry, she explores the divine in seemingly mundane aspects of ordinary existence, illustrating the unexpected and complex joys of everyday life. The mother of three, she lives in an antique mill house in New Preston, Connecticut with her dog, Bert. Setting the Table in the Age of Reason is her first book.

Book preview

EPICUREAN DELIGHT: ON THE NATURE OF THINGS

The irony behind the scientific knowledge

that there are atoms and void and nothing else:

divine minds are free to love

fearlessly, metaphysically.

The wrath of Jove and mythical thunderbolts

are erased, leaving us to pursue pleasure

and knowledge and enlightenment

in their higher, philanthropic sense.

After watery gruel of penance

we taste rich calm, without quid pro quo,

an eye without an eye, a tooth without a tooth.

Fear is nothing and Love is everything.

We keep a simpler recipe

for logical, all-governing Truth.

We soak our children

in a marinade of uncomplicated affection.

We stew for our families

a soulful, spicy soup

with a steadfast hand,

nourishing not only their blood

but their Hearts,

with every loving caress of the spoon.

SEASONAL COTTAGE

When the grass began to sprout

from the swathes of grey like

tufts of newborn hair, starkly

green and colorful against the dead

landscape, ripe for the

awakening: a signal,

a call to the Lake to install the

porch screens. We’d inspect the

damage from a hard-played previous

summer, winter months stacked

against the wall, tucked behind

antique wicker purchased

three generations ago.

Barn swallows, chimney swifts,

house sparrows and non-native

starlings didn’t take kindly

to having their nests moved,

so we avoided construction altogether,

pinching our whitened fingers

between hook and eye closures,

some winking with rust. The screens

streaked with mold, others

grey, having just been stapled to

chipped wooden frames, homemade

by the over-taxed man who

funded this seasonal household

at present.

Just like New York! he’d say,

as if this porch were the

epitome of fine-tuned engineering;

yet we all knew he hated the City,

in its constant state of decay.

Renewal, Dad… I’d protest,

thinking of the thousands of men

and women, scurrying on, over, under

its streets, changing the hardscape on which

they trod with heavy feet.

A HOUSE MADE OF STONE

Perhaps the origin of our own beings

exists there, at the center of

concentric ripples on water, where

the stone, a seed, was thrown:

an ephemeral place that is only

an impression, a start, a beginning.

When we turned our eyes

toward the sun, the waves

extended out of reach,

the rock lay at the bottom of

the pond, while its smoothness,

its weight was still keenly felt

between our growing fingers.

In later years, while bathing

like elder salmon returning upstream,

we will search for that small piece of gravel,

only to find that during our Odyssey

it has eroded to something

altogether unrecognizable.

CONNECTICUT DAWN

The morning my father died,

he woke before dawn,

attempting to start his final day

as he did all of the others:

with the quotidian copy of

The Hartford Courant,

clipped securely to

a lap board instead of laid

out on the breakfast table.

He used to liken our bodies

to that spread, "Look at you,

laid out like a warm breakfast,"

as