Pepper and Salt

by Brett Rutherford

and I was only thinking
about the shakers of salt and pepper
that were standing side by side on a place mat.
I wondered if they had become friends.
— Billy Collins, “You, Reader”

Pepper and salt
are enemies:

chessmen on the place mat,
one black, one white,
forward-left, forward-right
political knights,
or plowing angular,
dissenting bishops
each to his heaven,
his rival to hell —

spill from one, a run
of bad luck;
spill from the other,
a sneezing fit
precipitate
of a heart attack.

Salt is poison
to pepper’s ground:
no gardens grow
in Carthage, sown
with the sea’s bitters;

no papricum in Sodom
where Lot’s wife
stands petrified,
a mineral pillar.

If you are white,
all pepper is black,
a back-of-the-cupboard
kitchen mistress,
safely savored,
country of origin
unasked about,
milled, ground
to ash fineness.

If you are brown,
rainbows of spice
surround you:
cayenne, paprika,
jalapeño, chili,
hot on the tongue,
warm in the belly,
the edge of eros,
lips closing, teeth
bursting peppercorn,
sweat beads
across the forehead,
the supplicating smile,
the liquid eyes’ surrender.

A Chinese chef,
wise in the way of things,
heats Szechuan peppercorns
till aromatic smoke
stings, fries salt
in the pepper’s oil,
grinds all together
as “pepper-flavored salt.”

His yin-yang craft subdues
two rival empires.

But here and now,
on this chrome-formica
dinner table, two
pale glass cylinders
stand separate,
monogrammed,
one “S” — one “P” —
imagine the horror
if P got into the S shaker! —

forever apart,
and no, not even
remotely friends.