I know now that watching you eat
was what I once loved
about my mother: the necessity
of it, the intensity of it,
the unacknowledged pleasure—
everything that made reality
human. So much in life, my tender
experience, places things
in doubt, and here was proof,
above all sciences, that to be, to exist,
was hunger, and could be satisfied.
Beauty was to perceive, to see that
whatever else truth might be, this was fact.