Oatmeal by Galway Kinnell

Oatmeal

I eat oatmeal for breakfast.

I make it on the hot plate and put skimmed milk on it.

I eat it alone.

I am aware it is not good to eat oatmeal alone.

Its consistency is such that it is better for your mental health if somebody eats it with you.

That is why I often think up an imaginary companion to have breakfast with.

Possibly it is even worse to eat oatmeal with an imaginary companion.

Nevertheless, yesterday morning, I ate my oatmeal with John Keats.

Keats said I was right to invite him: due to its glutinous texture, gluey, hint of slime, and unusual willingness to disintegrate, oatmeal must never be eaten alone.

He said it is perfectly OK, however, to eat it with an imaginary companion,

and he himself had enjoyed memorable porridges with Edmund Spenser and John Milton.

He also told me about writing the “Ode to a Nightingale.”

He wrote it quickly, he said, on scraps of paper, which he then stuck in his pocket,

but when he got home he couldn’t figure out the order of the stanzas, and he and a friend spread the papers on a table, and they made some sense of them, but he isn’t sure to this day if they got it right.

He still wonders about the occasional sense of drift between stanzas,

and the way here and there a line will go into the configuration of a Moslem at prayer, then raise itself up and peer about, then lay itself down slightly off the mark, causing the poem to move forward with God’s reckless wobble.

He said someone told him that later in life Wordsworth heard about the scraps of paper on the table, and tried shuffling some stanzas of his own, but only made matters worse.

When breakfast was over, John recited “To Autumn.”

He recited it slowly, with much feeling, and he articulated the words lovingly, and his odd accent sounded sweet.

He didn’t offer the story of writing “To Autumn,” I doubt if there is much of one.

But he did say the sight of a just-harvested oat field got him started on it

and two of the lines, “For Summer has o’er-brimmed their clammy cells” and “Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours,” came to him while eating oatmeal alone.

I can see him—drawing a spoon through the stuff, gazing into the glimmering furrows, muttering—and it occurs to me:

maybe there is no sublime, only the shining of the amnion’s tatters.

For supper tonight I am going to have a baked potato left over from lunch.

I’m aware that a leftover baked potato can be damp, slippery, and simultaneously gummy and crumbly,

and therefore I’m going to invite Patrick Kavanagh to join me.