5: It is true that the dinner table is melancholy

(Work in progress, posting two parts of three)

Part I

An often overlooked passage in the middle of Genesis

states that God invented turgor pressure while sketching Adam

And a sapling grew from stray marks on His drafting table.

Thus begat Apple.

Who begat Dogwood, Juniper, and Linden.

Linden begat Maple who begat Bayberry, and Balsa

Who begat Sequoia

Spruce

And then Sycamore.

Weeding through the lineage of Trees,

we find our tallest ancestor

(the consistency of our Bibles)

funneled into fuel or furniture.

Creation carpentered into a more modern mesa:

the pine dining room patriarch,

our supper-time cedar storyteller.

The pedestal of civilization is a weighty business.

Surely there is shock, like the adrenaline

in the muscles of slaughterhouse cows,

a quiet trauma that infuses somewhere between

carrying the weight of leaves, limbs, fauna and fungus,

and the weight of dishes,

the story of people,

and the sterile quiet of polished silverware.

Part II

Thus begat Dinner Table,

our chiseled trophy of ligneous design,

civilization's Medium of Choice,

xylem tissue submitting into shrines of sustenance,

wood whittled to the icon of our Eating Habits:

The hearty Jesus-table is the beta, the basic,

a pine plateau that carried the Principles and the potatoes:

utilitarian, archival, humble.

The decisively pedestal English pub-top (a lush cockney cousin to the Cambridge armchair)

props pints, Protestants, and peanuts.

The Sears farmhouse flip-top is the suburban staple,

the catalog-plucked donkey for casseroles

with jointed gatelegs and fainting drop-leaves

sending his extremes bending like broken ballerinas

or weak chapel doors.

And there's the aggressively ornate Bastard Gothic--

a mahogany mess of collaged cathedral clippings

with sad Catholic legs that drop

spiraling to the floor with the awkward grace of rifled pigeons.