American Life in Poetry

Poets are experts at holding mirrors to the world. Here Anne Caston, from Alaska, shows us a commonplace scene. Haven’t we all been in this restaurant for the Sunday buffet?

Caston overlays the picture with language that, too, is ordinary – even sloganistic – and overworn. But by zooming in on the joint of meat and the belly-up fishes floating in butter, she compels us to look more deeply into what is before us, and a room that at first seemed humdrum becomes rich with inference.

Sunday Brunch at the Old Country Buffet Madison, Wisconsin, 1996

Here is a genial congregation,

well fed and rosy with health and appetite,

robust children in tow. They have come

and all the generations of them, to be fed,

their old ones too who are eligible now

for a small discount, having lived to a ripe age.

Over the heaped and steaming plates, one by one,

heads bow, eyes close; the blessings are said.

Here there is good will; here peace

on earth, among the leafy greens, among the fruits

of the gardens of America’s heartland. Here is abundance,

here is the promised

land of milk and honey, out of which

a flank of the fatted calf, thick still

on its socket and bone, rises like a benediction

over the loaves of bread and the little fishes, belly-up in butter.