Cooking Tofu

First I take the vegetables,
peppers, snow peas, and carrots,
then a little butter.
I slice the tofu into quarters,
place them in the middle,
white blocks
surrounded with color,
think of it in its cooking body,
christen it
Small Pale Stonehenge
in Cut Garden.

After cooking them,
I take the tofu down the throat,
suck the juice from it,
one cube at a time,
crushing them at the gullet.

Odd curdled creature, milk in form,
ordered in shape
and given nothing to a flavor.

We make a world around us,
take what nature gives and orders it:

snow peas into measured bags,
carrots, eight to a bundle,
peppers, six to a pack,
tofu, strange wonderful tofu,
block of blandness, plain as its hue,
rubber lump of provision
I take into myself.