I really don't want to spill my water on this computer.
And I'm capable of doing such a thing.
Well let's start with some soup.
It's always good to start with soup, isn't it.
Primordial Soup.
How is the sound all the way back?
Is it good?
You're good?
OK.
Primordial Soup.
The idea came to me in the kitchen,
while I was cutting cilantro for the black beans,
and my friend and I were talking while the sea outside
remained the sea, holding its mysteries in the dark,
tempting us with its surface dazzle.
The idea came, as if a theory of war I'd been working on.
Though, in truth, it just bubbled up
like the first disturbance in a pot that means
the soup is about to boil.
Is there something in us, I asked
him, my friend who was waving the celery tops at me
and asking with his eyes if they belonged in the soup.
And I was saying, yes, with my eyebrows.
And by "us," I didn't mean the man and the woman
feeling the man and woman thing while cooking together
in the kitchen by the sea, where the wind carried salt
into our every breath.
But I meant our animal selves, our mysteries
in the dark of mind and body.
That doesn't feel balanced without the threat
of dangerous animals, the African brain of us,
the sinew and blood, longing for the bond between predator
and prey that we've tossed with the entrails
of farm-raised salmon and beef.
Mine was an amateur theory of war that we wage it.
Not our kind, so it's fine to kill them,
mindless of the mechanism ticking and cranking
and blowing up beneath the surface inside us.
We don't even know what we're doing when we do it.
What lesson in being human did we not first
learn from the animals?
The cheetah was the first domestic cat.
In ancient Egypt, the keepers asked, as we ask,
can we please make the violent lie down and go to sleep,
and when it wakes to lap calmly from the saucer?
And then, the something that was in us was soup.
A liquor that had blown from the sea right into our bowls.