[Pink Pig Time Machine by Wilfrid: June 8, 2009]
Ten years ago this week, I ate my first dinner at Wild Blue, Michael Lomonaco's stylish fine dining annex to Windows on the World at the top of the World Trade Center.
For Michael Lomonaco and the other survivors, the dishes I enjoyed. For those who lost their lives, lines from Martín Espada's elegy for the World Trade Center restaurant workers - "Alabanza" (praise!).
Braised beef cheeks with mustard sauce
Suckling pig, mashed potatoes, young carrots with ginger
Volnay 1er Cru "Les Caillerets" 1992
Mango sundae
Pedro Ximenez
...
Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up,
like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium.
Praise the great windows where immigrants from the kitchen
could squint and almost see their world, hear the chant of nations:
Ecuador, México, Republica Dominicana,
Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen in the morning,
where the gas burned blue on every stove
and exhaust fans fired their diminutive propellers,
hands cracked eggs with quick thumbs
or sliced open cartons to build an altar of cans.
Alabanza. Praise the busboy's music, the chime-chime
of his dishes and silverware in the tub.
Alabanza. Praise the dish-dog, the dishwasher
who worked that morning because another dishwasher
could not stop coughing, or because he needed overtime
to pile the sacks of rice and beans for a family
floating away on some Caribbean island plagued by frogs.
Alabanza. Praise the waitress who heard the radio in the kitchen
and sang to herself about a man gone. Alabanza.
After the thunder wilder than thunder,
after the shudder deep in the glass of the great windows,
after the radio stopped singing like a tree full of terrified frogs,
after night burst the dam of day and flooded the kitchen,
for a time the stoves glowed in darkness like the lighthouse in Fajardo,
like a cook's soul. Soul I say, even if the dead cannot tell us
about the bristles of God's beard because God has no face,
soul I say, to name the smoke-beings flung in constellations
across the night sky of this city and cities to come.
Alabanza I say, even if God has no face."
The full text of Espada's great poem is here.
