Rossini, the great opera composer, could recall only two moments of real grief in his life. One, when his mother died. And the second time was out on a boat when a chicken stuffed with truffles fell into the water and was lost.

Sometimes, when he was nearing death, I'd go over to help Art cook. I'm down on my knees on the patio, and Art is sitting in a chair with a beer. He has grilled steaks to a cinder and caught the juice. And now I pound the meat with a claw hammer until it's infused with cloves of garlic and peppercorns. Then I shred it with my fingers, put it all in a bowl with the saved juice and herbs, and then simmer. This is machaca according to his late wife's recipe and it takes hours, and this is life, or the best part, he believes as he sits in the chair while I bend and pound to spare his battered old joints. It is a deep taste of something within his bones.

We are outside in the old downtown barrio while I pound in the desert sun, and nearby are the justicia flaming-orange flowers and the chuparosa with the buzz of hummingbirds and the nicotiana reaching up twelve, fourteen feet, the pale-green leaves, the spikes of yellow flowers, the costa hummingbirds with purple gorgets that seem to favor it, and Art beams and says, "My birds, my plants."

He takes another swig of beer, and beads of cold moisture fleck the can. Maybe it is the mouth, I think, as I sit down in the garden, swirling red wine in my mouth, dry wine, the kind that reaches back toward the throat and lasts for maybe half a minute on the tongue.

Anyway, when we made the machaca, Art was alive then, and being alive is gardening and cooking and birds and green and blue, at the very least. He was relaxed. I pounded the garlic and pepper, and grilled flesh hung in the air. He told me that during the Korean War, his Navy ship made a run from Philadelphia to Europe, and during the Atlantic crossing five officers went over the side and nobody ever writes about stuff like that. But he knows, he was there and all fell overboard at night. They were all assholes, he said.

The beef was tender, the chiles hot, but not too hot, just enough to excite the tongue, and the seasonings bite, the garlic licks the taste buds, and I began to float on the sensations as Art drank his beer and the plants grew and stirred, the hummingbirds whizzed overhead and then hovered before my face, my tongue rubbed against the roof of my mouth, and it is all a swirl of sensation as I remember that summer day cooking.

I also remember Art (died February 11) sitting down in my garden in a chair on a Sunday in January, the last day he left home under his own power. He could barely walk then, his chunky body dwindling as the cancer snacked on various organs, and his skin was yellow from the jaundice. He held on to my arm as we crept through the garden, down from the upper bench, past the bed of trichocereus, under the thin arms of the selenicereus snaking through the tree overhead. He looked over by the notocactus, with their dark-green columns, their tawny rows of bristles and small bubbles of white down on their crowns where the yellow flowers would finally emerge; he looked over there where I'd scattered Dick's bone and ash and he said brightly, Hi, Dick (died August 23).

We sat in plastic chairs surrounded by garden walls that were purple, yellow, and pink, colors to fight back all the nights. He knew he'd be dead in two or three weeks, and he was. He knew he'd never see this spring, just as Dick had never made it to the previous fall. And five months before Dick had been Paul (died March 9). And five months after Art would come Chris (died August 6).

The cooking had begun earlier, like the gardening, but both took hold of me around the time my friends started dying. I remember walking to the market, coming home and flipping through books for recipes, and then cooking. While the sauce simmered, I would open a bottle of red wine and begin drinking. There was never enough red wine, never. I was always cooking from Italian recipes because they were simple and bold and I loved the colors, the red of the tomatoes, the green skin of the zucchini, and because I like peeling garlic and chopping onions and tearing basil. The oil mattered also, the thought of olives, and I preferred the stronger, cheaper oils with their strong tastes. I used iron pans coated with green enamel on the outside. There would be scent in the air.

The garden also went out of control. I put in five or six tons of rock. Truckloads of soil. I built low terraces and planted cactus and a few herbs. I had no plan and the thing grew from someplace in my mind.

I must tell you about this flower, Selenicereus plerantus. It opens only in the dark; it begins to unfold around 9:00 p.m. and it closes before dawn, slams shut at the very earliest probes of gray light. When it blooms, no one can be alone at night, it is not possible, nor can anyone fear the night, not in the slightest. This flower touches your face, it kisses your ear, its tongue slides across your crotch. The flower is shameless, absolutely shameless. When it opens its white jaws, the petals span a foot and lust pours out into the night, a lust as heavy as syrup, and everything is coated by the carnality of this plant. It opens only on the hottest nights of the year, black evenings when the air is warmer than your body and you cannot tell where your flesh ends and the world begins.

A month, maybe a month and a half, before Chris died, he came over in the evening. He could not control his hiccuping then--the radiation, you know. And he found it better to stand in his weakness than to sit. He wore a hat; his hair was falling out. So we were out in the darkness, him hiccuping and not drinking--he just did not want that beer anymore--and the flower opened and flooded the yard with that lust, the petals gaping shamelessly, and we watched it unfold and felt the lust caress us and he hiccuped and took it all in.

He understood that flower, I'm sure of it.

Blind old Homer wrote that no part of us is more like a dog than the "brazen belly, crying to be remembered." By the twentieth century, there were fifty or sixty thousand codified recipes in Italian cooking alone. By the mid-twentieth century, Italians were eating seven hundred different pasta shapes, and one sauce, Bolognese, had hundreds of variations.

What can death mean in the face of this drive? What can death say at this table? I tell you: Art called up when things had gotten pretty bad and said he had this craving for strawberry Jell-O.

There must be something about the mouth, about the sucking and the licking and the chewing and the sweet and the sour. The pepper also, and the saline. An English cookbook of 1660 suggests a cake recipe that consumes a half bushel of flour, three pounds of butter, fourteen pounds of currants, two pounds of sugar, and three quarts of cream. There is a leg of mutton smeared with almond paste and a pound of sugar and then garnished with chickens, pigeons, capons, cinnamon, and, naturally, more sugar.

The dark-green flesh of the cactus glows with life from the ash and ground human bone. I've come to depend upon the garden, and so I stare at the Madagascar palms, their thorny trunks bristling under the canopy of the mesquite tree. Red wine swirls against my tongue because this bone gardening, this wall of green flesh, has all become hopelessly oral with me. I eat, therefore I am. I appreciate nothing, devour everything.

Art found out about the cancer after Thanksgiving. He couldn't really eat. It wasn't the chemotherapy, since he'd passed on that after having a first bout with the colon cancer, and to be honest, the doctors didn't recommend chemo or any other therapy. They gave him prescriptions for opiates and advised him to take lots of them and not to worry. But he didn't like them, didn't like having his mind turn to mush, and besides, he was an old narc, and I think pill popping didn't quite sit right with him. But he couldn't eat, just had no appetite, and when he ate, he felt kind of sick. The cancer was everywhere, of course, with the liver just being the signature location.

So I took him over some marijuana brownies and that evening he took two and then spent half the night in the kitchen--frying steaks and potatoes, whipping up this and that, and gorging. And after that, he refused ever to take another brownie.

Art said they upset his stomach.

But, Lord, that one night, he came alive and tasted deeply.

She has the gift of writing exactly the way she speaks and speaking exactly the way she thinks. For years I have gotten letters from Barbara, and they are always fresh and clear and without any of the filters we generally use to guard our hearts. When she writes of her son's death, her words remain the same. Paul was not a surprise to her. She is an artist, her father was an artist, his father was an artist. And it has never been easy--art is not made by the easy, but it has been in the house for generations and felt as a part of life. She told me that's what she put on his tombstone: artist.

At first she was very angry. Not at Paul, at least not in a way she was ready to say, but at the people around him who introduced him to heroin and then did nothing as the drug took over his soul. Shouldn't they have done something? Didn't they realize what they had unleashed? Aren't they responsible? And, of course, the questions were sound and the answers were deserved and Paul was still dead.

She works, she organizes his papers, letters, his art work. She revisits the studio, the pipe, the rope, a boy hanging there. She writes me, "Found out Paul hung for over 8--9 hours. That would not have happened had I been there. 8--9 hours after he was found. Fuck the criminal codes. My baby hung by his neck for as long as 14 hours. I didn't think there could be more pain."

They take away the mints because the case is metal. They scrutinize the carton of cigarettes also and then I'm allowed on the ward. Dick is puzzled by the shower, why the head is buried up some kind of funnel in the ceiling. It takes him weeks to figure out they are trying to prevent him from hanging himself. Of course, he cannot think clearly, what with the steady dose of electroshock treatments. He'd checked himself in after the suicide attempt failed. He had saved up his Valiums, taken what he figured to be a massive dose, and then, goddammit, still woke up Monday morning when by any decent standards he ought to have been dead. It was the depression, he told me, the endless blackness. He could handle the booze, and when he was rolling, that was a quart or two of vodka a night, plus coke, of course, to stay alert for the vodka. There was that time he'd checked into detox with blood oozing from his eyes and ears and ass. But he could handle that. He was working on the smoking, didn't light up in the house, you know.

But he couldn't take the depression, never tasted blackness like that. I'd go out in the evening to the ward and we'd sit outside in the walled yard, kind of like a prison, and for two days I tried to get him to pitch horseshoes. Finally, on the third night, he tried but couldn't make the distance between the two pits. The shoes, of course, were plastic, lest the patients hurt one another. But we worked on it, and he got to tossing okay.

We'd been friends for a good long time, business partners once, and we'd survived being in business together, so we must've really been friends, and he'd always been like me, riding a little roughshod over the way life was supposed to be lived, but he'd kept his spirits up. Not now.

When he got out, I'd go over and take him to the store. He could not move. I'd walk him from the car into the market and then walk with him up and down the aisles. He could not connect with food. I'd buy him bananas because his potassium was low, and lots of green vegetables. He couldn't abide this; he told me he'd never eaten anything green since he was five. Then I'd take him through the checkout and home. The place was a wreck. One day I showed him how to clean off one square foot of the kitchen counter. He watched me do it. I said, Look, you do a foot a day and if you don't do a damn thing else, you'll feel like you did something. His face remained passive.

I'd bring him over and cook dinner and make him eat it. Then we'd sit in the yard, he'd stare out at the cactus and trees, and his eyes would glaze at the twisting paths and clouds of birds. He could hardly speak. The blackness, he'd say by way of explaining.

My huge Argentine mesquite arced over the yard. Nobody believed I'd planted it myself, dug the hole and everything, and that when I put it in the ground, it did not come up to my knee. I remember when I planted it, a woman was over and I told her what this little sapling would become and she said, Nope, it ain't gonna happen. But it did.

I kept trying to get Dick to plant trees. But it was like the horseshoes. It came hard.

In 1696, Mme. de Maintenon, Louis XIV's longtime mistress, writes, "Impatience to eat [peas], the pleasure of having eaten them, and the anticipation of eating them again are the three subjects I have heard very thoroughly dealt with. . . . Some women, having supped, and supped well, at the king's table, have peas waiting for them in their rooms before going to bed."

Peas are new to the French court and all those lascivious mouths and expert tongues are anxious for this new sensation. I applaud this pea frenzy. Who would want a stoic as a cook?

Mme. de Maintenon, sixty-one years old, now secretly wed to the king, stalwart of court etiquette, she likes her pea pods dipped in a sauce, and then she licks them. Yes, she does.

Going up the stairs, I instantly miss the sunlight. Outside, Brooklyn in January is brilliant and the sea is in the air. The stairs feel narrow and dim and cold and dank, and it is like leaving childhood behind for the grave. In my memory, Paul is a child, permanently around the age of, say, ten. I've seen his later photographs on driver's licenses, and the face seems gaunt, the eyes hollow. I'm afraid of finding the room those eyes came from, finding it upstairs at the end of these seemingly endless flights of stairs, with almost no light, a chill in the air, and that dampness that says no one cooks in the kitchen and the woman is never in the bed.

But the machinery standing in the gray light of the big room comforts me. I have stumbled into a surviving pocket of the nineteenth century, that time when people still believed that they could throw themselves at problems and wrestle with materials and fabricate solutions. The morning bleeds through the large windows and glows against the shrink-wrap machine. He had a thing about shrink-wrap--the more you stressed it, the stronger it became. I soak up the room and feel at peace. This is a proper shop for a craftsman and his craft. His craft was pretty simple: He was going to be the best fucking artist in the world and show that all the other stuff was shit. He was going to cut through the fakery and the fashion and get to the ground floor, the killing floor, the factory floor. He was not about tricks or frills or style. He was brutally simple and industrial-strength. I can feel him here, his mouth a firm line, his hair carelessly framing his totally absorbed face, his body bent over slightly as he tinkers with some project, oblivious to everything, including himself, pushing on relentlessly toward mastering a riddle that only he sees or feels or can solve. He's forgotten to eat for a day, his dog watches him silently from a corner of the big room, a stillness hangs over everything and is only slightly broken by the careful movements he makes.

Over in a corner of the shop is the apartment he carved out of the vast cavern of the old factory, and sketched on his door is an arrow pointing down to the floor and a message to slide the mail under here. It has the look of something a twelve-year-old would do. And enjoy doing. I half expect Orville and Wilbur Wright to tap me on the shoulder, or to hear old Henry Ford laconically announcing idiot-savant theses about the coming industrial age. I'm in the past, a place Paul picked to find the future. There is a feeling of grime everywhere, an oil-based grime that has come off machines as they inhaled and exhaled in the clangor of their work. I stand over a worktable and open a cigar box of crayons and carefully pluck two for myself, a blue and a red. I ask a friend of Paul's a question, and he visibly tightens and says suddenly that he can't stay in here anymore. He says he is still upset. So I go alone and look down the narrow hallway to the door to this loft/studio/factory floor and glance up at the stout pipe; it looks to be six or eight inches in diameter. Then I come back to the factory room and see a piece of a black doormat that Paul had nailed to the wall. It says quietly, get home.

I think, Well, shit, so this is where he hung himself.

King Solomon's palace was probably one warm home. He lived with seven hundred wives and three hundred girlfriends and somehow everybody tore through ten oxen a day, plus chunks of gazelles and hartebeests. The Bible said the wise old king had twelve thousand horsemen charging around the countryside scaring up chow for the meals back home.

Money does not replace the lust for food. Or the flesh. Nothing replaces it, nothing. Sometimes it dies, this appetite, sometimes it just vanishes in people. But it is never replaced. By 1803, one restaurant in Paris had kept its stockpot bubbling twenty-four hours a day for eighty-five years. Three hundred thousand capons had gone into the pot over the decades. This is what we like to call a meaningless statistic. Until we open our mouths. Or catch the scent of a woman. Or lean over into a bloom raging in the night.

I'd come out to the ranch, a two-hundred-acre remaining fragment of the fifty to eighty square miles that once wore his family's brand, and we'd sit on the porch and have a beer. Chris worked as a carpenter and enjoyed life. He knew every plant and rock for miles around. He didn't seem to give a damn about being born into money and now living without it. I never heard him say a word about it. He cared about when one of his cows was going to calf. And he liked not owning a horse--he prided himself on getting along without one and in wearing sensible boots instead of narrow, high-heeled cowboy boots like every other person in a western city.

He'd show me things. The foundations of a settler's cabin down the hill. The little collapsed house he and his first wife lived in along the arroyo. An old Indian village.

I remember the village clearly. We walked for an hour or two or more and then hit a steep incline under the palisades. Chris paused and pointed out the hawk and falcon nesting sites. Then his legs went uphill at a steady pace, like pistons. At the top, we slid through a narrow chute and were upon a small village on a mesa. At the entrance was a low wall and piles of rocks for throwing at invaders. This was clearly a fort people fled to in some time of trouble five hundred years or more ago.

Chris had been coming here since he was a boy. The place, like almost everything else in the area, was his secret. We sat up there in the sunshine, swallowing a couple hundred square miles of scenery and saying little. He was like that. I hardly ever heard him complain. Things just are. And if you look around, they're pretty good. Have a cold beer, a warm meal. And take in the countryside.

In the first century, Apicius put together a manuscript that lets us visit the lust of the Roman palate. The empire made all things possible--Apicius once outfitted a ship because he'd heard some good-sized shrimp were being caught off North Africa. The emperor Vitellius, said to be somewhat of a pig at table, favored a dish of pike liver, pheasant brains, peacock brains, flamingo tongues, and lamprey roe. Apicius is supposed to have killed himself when he was down to his last couple of million bucks because he could not bear to lower his standard of living. Before there was a language of words on paper, there must have been a language of food. Speech begins with the fire and the kettle. I am sure of this.

When I was drinking at the grave, I didn't feel quite right. I'd been uneasy about leaving Dick, worried about two days away. I'd gone down and gotten him bailed out a few days before, done the shopping trips, talked to him about the importance of cleaning a counter. All of that. We had sat in the yard and watched the woodpecker eat insects in the throb of the August air. His speech was very slow and nothing seemed to ever lift, nothing. He'd been fired, the drinking had come back, the electroshock didn't seem to do much good, and the gambling dug in deep until he had about a hundred thousand on the credit cards. So we'd sit in the yard and I'd explain that you can't beat a slot machine, that you can't win. He'd say, That's it, that's it, you can't win.

So when I left for a memorial mass in a distant city for a murder victim named Bruno Jordan who'd crossed my path, I felt ill at ease. Out at the cemetery after the mass, we stood around the grave drinking beer and talking, and then we went back to the house in the barrio for dinner, one cousin looking down at the grave and saying, Hey, Bruno, see you back at the house.

The next day, when I came through the door, the phone was ringing. They'd found the body. Dick had been dead two days. He'd died clean, nothing in his body. He'd accidentally tripped on the rug, hit his head on the dining-room table, that was it. He'd been working on a book about the drinking life.

Dick had always had one terror: that he would die drunk.

So God smiled on him.

I feel surprisingly at peace. Walking the few blocks from the subway, I took in the Brooklyn street, warming to its resemblance to the endless warrens of houses and factories I knew in Chicago. It looked just like the places Paul lived as a boy, and I thought, You cagey guy, you found the Midwest in New York. Behind the factory-now-loft stands a Russian church, thrown up in the 1920s by those determined to keep the lamp of faith lit on a distant shore. Across from that is a small park with beaten grass, the kind of sliver of light our urban planners have always tossed to the inmates of our great cities. It all felt very comfortable to me. When Paul was a small boy, I can remember walking across the tundra of Chicago to visit his parents' apartment and passing scenes just like these in this pocket of Brooklyn. And the workspace itself, with its patina of grime from machines, its workman's bench, its monastic sense of craft, hard work, and diligence, recalls the various places Paul toiled as a boy--his room, the cellar, the corner grabbed in some cottage in the country. That's part of the sense of peace I feel pervading me. I think to myself, Paul, you kept the faith.

I've gotten up before dawn and gone over his letters, which I've brought with me, and the bank statements, all the while sipping coffee in a mid-Manhattan hotel. The numbers on the statements blurred as I sat amid businessmen who were studying CNN on the lounge television, and then I'd look back down at the bank statements and feel as though I were watching the spinning dials of a slot machine, only this machine always comes up with the same result: a hundred dollars a day. December, January, February, the steady withdrawals are punctual and exact. I thought to myself, Paul, you create order even in your disorder. So later when I stand in the big room where he tore at the limits of what he called art and plunged into some place he hoped was behind that name, when I touch his row of tools on the workbench and admire his shrink-wrap machine in one corner, whirring in my head is this blur of numbers as he swallowed his earnings in a grim, orderly fashion. I look over at the wall, the one punctured by the hallway leading to the doorway and the stout pipe against the ceiling, and read once more the doormat still whispering, get home. I reach up and rip the black message from the wall. This one I am taking home.

Paul was up to something here. I know this in my bones.

He kind of scowls and comes limping across the kitchen at me, saying, No, no. He takes the knife and says, Here, see, you gotta do this rocking motion, and with that he chops the hell out of the cilantro. Art will be dead in three weeks, and this is his last hurrah, teaching me how to make salsa cruda. He's real yellow now, wheezing all the time, and beneath the yellow is the color of ash.

He's got these papers to straighten out, and we go over them. He's going to do a bit of writing, and so I bring the office chair and computer. But then he can't sit up anymore, and we try to jerry-rig something in the easy chair. And then that's too much and the damn fluid is building in his body, he's all bloated and distended, and, by God, he tells the nurse who comes to the house each day, he's gotta get the swelling drained at the hospital. And she says, That won't do any good, you're not sick, you're dying. He listens without so much as a blink, I'm sitting right there, and then he pads down the hall to his bedroom, lies down, and sleeps. In twenty-four hours, he goes into a coma. The next day, he's dead after a night of family praying and shouting over him--ancient aunts hollering messages in his ear for other family members that have gone to the boneyard ahead of him. His cousin, the monsignor, says the funeral mass.

I can still taste the salsa and smell the cilantro and feel that rocking motion as he tries to show me the right way to wield the knife. And to make salsa, his salsa, as he learned it from his wife, Josie, who learned from her parents and back into the brown web of time. Like everything that matters to the tongue, it is simple.

» Put five or six sixteen-ounce cans of whole TOMATOES into a big pot, reserving the liquid. Coarse-grind the tomatoes in a food processor, a short pulse so they come out in chunks and not puree. Now add them to the reserved juice.

» Cut up two or three bunches of GREEN ONION, in very thin slices so that you end up with tiny circles. Now very finely cut up a bunch of CILANTRO.

» Add five cans of diced GREEN CHILES, a teaspoon of GARLIC POWDER, and the onion and cilantro to the tomatoes and their juice. Sprinkle a teaspoon or two of OREGANO. Taste it and adjust seasoning.

» Now start crushing CHILTEPINS(Capsicum annuum var. aviculare) and add to taste. Add salt. Taste again. Keep crushing chiltepins until it is right for your tongue.

That was the last time I really saw him move, when he was trying to teach me how to make salsa cruda. He knew some things can't be allowed to end.

The bottom line is always simple, and the way to this line is to get rid of things. I stand at a hot stove and make risotto, a rice dish of the Italian north:

» Melt some butter in oil, then sauté some CHOPPED ONION, toss in the RICE, and coat it with the oil; add the liquid (make the first ladle white wine, then go with broth) a half cup at a time, constantly stirring.

» In twenty minutes, the rice is ready, the center of each kernel a little resistant to the tooth, but ready. Each grain is saturated with the broth and onion and oil flavor.

» Then spread the rice on the plate to cool and eat from the edge inward. Pick a brilliant plate with rich color--I like intense blues and greens, you know--to play off the white. Some mix in A HALF OR FULL CUP OF GRATED PARMESAN to the rice to make it stickier. I just sprinkle some on top and usually favor Romano, because it has more bite. But that is your choice.

The rest is not. After all, we are in Paul's workshop, a thing to be kept clean and simple and direct. The difference between good art and good cooking is you can eat cooking. But the important part, the getting rid of things, it is always there and the kid knew it.

The kid worked. Like most products of the Midwest, I can't abide people who fuck off and don't do things. I can remember my father sitting at a kitchen table in Chicago with his quart of beer, telling me with a snarl that in Chicago we make things, but in New York they just sell things.

I look up at the torn drywall. When Paul didn't answer the phone, his uncle flew from Chicago to New York and took a cab over here to Brooklyn. Clawed his way through the drywall--I look up at the hole he made--and found Paul swinging from the big pipe. He'd left a note and neat accounts on the table, plus his checkbook, so everyone would be paid off proper.

I hum to myself as I look up at that pipe. Hum that song by John Prine about the hole in Daddy's arm where all the money goes.

It got so he couldn't do much. One day his ex-wife, Mary, stopped by the ranch to check on him, and he was sprawled in the doorway, half in the house and half out, surrounded by the dogs and cats.

So Mary took him into town. He'd been busy at the ranch despite his weakness as the cancer ate. He'd been building check dams to cure a century of erosion; he planted a garden, put the boots to the cattle, and let the hills come back. He said ranching was over and it was time for the earth to get some other kind of deal. I'd run into him a week or so before at the feed mill and he was chipper. His hair had just about all fallen out because of the radiation, but he said he felt good. He was in town to get a part for the pump.

He was real lean by then, and when I went down to see him at Mary's place, he was stretched out in bed. He wanted to talk Mexico, the people, the plants, the cattle, the way the air felt at night. I brought down some pictures of Mexico and we hung them around the room. He was having some kind of magic tar shipped down from Colorado that was supposed to beat back the cancer, and he was tracking the pennant race also. People would drop by at all hours to see him, since the word was out that he was a goner. He'd smoke a joint with them, talk about this and that, especially Mexico, which he knew was color and sound and smell and taste and a wood fire with a kettle on the coals. Some of the time he lived down there in a shack with a campesino family. When he fell in the doorway at the ranch, half in and half out, he was pretty much set to go back to Mexico. That was on hold at the moment as he tackled dying.

He lasted about a week. I went over one day, and he was propped up in bed so that the tumor blocking his throat didn't pester him too much. He said, Chuck, I got some great news. We just got two inches of rain at the ranch.

Yes. I can smell the sweet grass as the clouds lift.

She is at war with herself, the life within her fighting the death without her. And she knows this. And she writes me this. She says, "So after I talked to you, I went out to the cemetery. The sun was out here and it was a beautiful day. Snow in patches hugging the earth in lovely patterns making me realize the earth has temperatures of variation, like a body. I had not realized that before. Then as I drove back, a rage overtook me and I raped and pillaged. I went to where I used to live along the beach and cut branches from bushes I know will bloom (not in obvious places or so they would hurt the bush or tree). Many, many branches that filled up the trunk of the car and the backseat. It took an hour and a half to get them all recut and into water all over my house and closed porch. I've been cutting forsythia and 'forcing' it, but haven't tried these others--redbud, cherry, baby's breath, flowering almond, weigela (probably too late a bloomer), lilac (doubt this one will work). . . ."

As she writes this to me, it is March, a month when boys hang themselves, a month when winter has stayed too long. A month when spring is near and force may be applied.

I don't trust the answers or the people who give me the answers. I believe in dirt and bone and flowers and fresh pasta and salsa cruda and red wine. I do not believe in white wine; I insist on color. I think death is a word and life is a fact, just as food is a fact and cactus is a fact.

There is apparently a conspiracy to try to choke me with words. There are these steps to death--is it seven or twelve or what? fuck, I can't remember--and then you arrive at acceptance. Go toward the light. Our Father who art in heaven. Whosoever shall believe in me shall not perish. Too many words choking me, clutching at my throat until they strangle any bad words I might say. Death isn't the problem. The words are, the lies are. I have sat now with something broken inside me for months, and the words--death, grief, fear--don't touch my wounds.

I have crawled back from someplace where it was difficult to taste food and where the flowers flashing their crotches in my face all but lacked scent. My wounds kept me alive; my wounds, I now realize, were life. I have drunk a strong drug and my body is ravaged by all the love and caring and the colors and forms and the body growing still in the new silence of the room as someone I knew and loved ceased breathing.

I remember standing in the room with Art's corpse, so warm, his heart had stopped beating maybe a hundred and twenty seconds earlier, and I stood there wondering, What has changed now, what is it that just took place? And I realized that I had advanced not an inch from where I stood as a boy when I held my dying dog and watched life wash off his furry face with a shudder. I do not regret this inability to grow into wisdom. I listen to Chris saying, Good news, two inches of rain at the ranch. Look up at the stout pipe Paul picked for the rope. Hear Dick slowly trying to explain--in words so soft I must lean forward to hear them--why he cannot pick up a plastic horseshoe in the evening light at the nuthouse. Then these pat words show up that people offer me and these pious words slink away like a cur flinching from this new stillness on the wind.

Almost every great dish in Italian cooking has fewer than eight ingredients. Get rid of things or food will be complex and false. In the garden, there is no subtlety. A flower is in your face and is never named Emily. Be careful of the words; go into the bone garden and then taste desire. So it has taken months and it is still a matter of the tongue and of lust. And if you go toward that light and find it, piss on it for me.

I would believe in the words of solace if they included fresh polenta with a thickened brown sauce with shiitake and porcini mushrooms. The corn must be coarse-ground and simmered and stirred for at least forty minutes, then spread flat on a board about an inch thick and cooled in a rich yellow sheet. The sauce, a brew of vegetable broth, white wine, pepper, salt, some olive oil, and minced garlic, is rich like fine old wood in a beloved and scarred table. When you are ready, grill a slab of the polenta, having first lightly brushed it with olive oil, then ladle on some sauce. And eat. The dish is brutally simple. But it skirts the lie of the words of solace; it does not deny desire.

Never deny desire. Not once. Always go to the garden and the kitchen. Whatever death means, the large white cactus flower still opens in the evening and floods the air with lust and hot wet loins. The mushroom sauce on the corn mush will calm no one, either.

That is why they are better than the words.

As I sit here, Chris is to the south, Art is to the west, Paul is back east, and Dick is in the backyard by the fierce green flesh of the cactus. These things I know. The answers I don't know, nor am I interested. That is why food is important and plants are important. Because they are not words and the answers people offer me are just things they fashion out of words. A simple veal ragú is scent and texture and color and soft on the tongue. It is important to cut onions by hand. The power of the flower at night is frightening, the lust floods the air and destroys all hope of virtue.

There will be more blooms this spring--the cactus grew at least ten feet last year. They will open around nine in the evening and then close at the first gray light of dawn. I'll sit out there with a glass of red wine and the lights out.

When I tell people about the blooms, about how they open around nine and close before sunrise and do this just for one night, they always ask, Is that all?

Yes. That's all.

Cook. Eat.

CIBRÉO IS SMALL and maybe six or eight blocks from Dante's old house in Florence. The night air was cool and flavored with the roasting chestnuts of street-corner vendors. The place has an open kitchen, low-key help, and high prices. The wine ran fifty a bottle, dinner for two passed two hundred.

It was about YELLOW-PEPPER SOUP.

»Mince some CELERY, ONION, AND CARROTS-- this is the good part, the slow part with just a constant chop, chop, chop and the feel and color of vegetables.

»Now put them into the kettle with TWO TABLESPOONS OF GOOD OLIVE OIL and stir them over a moderate heat for maybe ten minutes, until they get soft.

»Earlier you've grilled, say, HALF A DOZEN YELLOW BELL PEPPERS, skinned and seeded and cut into strips.

»Add the peppers and let them flavor everything for four or five minutes, then put in A COUPLE OF PEELED AND DICED AVERAGE-SIZED POTATOES>.

»Next, a quart of water and A COUPLE CUPS OF GOOD CHICKEN STOCK you've made in the by and by.

»Now let it simmer for about twenty-five minutes-- until the potatoes are soft. Puree it all, and then you might add some BAY LEAVES and MILK to knock down any acidity. Or you might let well enough alone.

AS A DISH it is very simple; most things that matter are. Certainly that is true of flowers, smells, colors, and the fresh breath of sky. At Cibréo they were insistent that you should never cut up the onions with a machine. It kind of mushes them, they say. I believe them. I have swallowed the E=mc2 of cooking.

By the time I got to the restaurant that night, everybody had died on me. And I carried this fact around with me like a stone. But it did not hurt my appetite.