TSAMPA

Last night I ate some soup

from a box

that I bought in the Patagonia outlet store with you.

It was very good

and made me sure that I could survive in the wild

on nothing but that if I had to.

I wanted to call and tell you about the taste

and about an idea I had for a get-rich-quick scheme

involving dogs and French cuisine

& to say I love you for the thousandth time,

but your phone was off and you were already on the plane

I hope having a little bottle of chardonnay

or the vegetarian in-flight dinner option

or a weird dream.

But the truth is I wouldn’t survive in the wild, probably.

I'm too soft and learn too slowly.

Important things often miss me entirely

like the phone calls you made or the salt in your voice

or the fact that Tsampa is not, as I assumed, an herb but a flour

from the Highlands of Tibet

that is typically eaten ground up

with butter and tea.

You've promised not to talk to me too much while you're away

which assumes something very backwards

about both of us, I think, but my sense

of direction is not to be trusted

(you were the one who found the path to the beach, after all)

and is another strike against me surviving

even one night out of doors.

You would last better, probably.

The long arms and good instincts.

And maybe that makes you more real somehow,

your lithium mind fastened to something heat-seeking & hungry.

And maybe it's irrelevant.

Relevance never got us all that far anyway —

suspicions hold better,

protein-rich & shelf-stable

like canned fish,

to be unpacked and eaten on the move.

I heard a dog today barking at a car which was you

and last week someone gave me a recipe for onion soup

which was also you

and I've been thinking a lot about what it is in me

that finds you

in everything

and how it got there.

I don't want to interrupt your adventure with more

so I will just to say "hi"

and to please call if you taste

a really great soup.