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i eat oatmeal for breakfast.
i make it on the hot plate and put skimmed milk on it.
i eat it alone.
i am aware it is not good to eat oatmeal alone.
its consistency is such that it is better for your mental health if
	somebody eats it with you.
that is why i often think up an imaginary companion to have
	breakfast with.
possibly it is even worse to eat oatmeal with an imaginary companion.
nevertheless, yesterday morning, i ate my oatmeal with john keats.
keats said i was right to invite him: due to its glutinous texture, gluey
	lumpishness, hint of slime, and unusual willingness to  
	disintegrate, oatmeal must never be eaten alone. 
he said that in his opinion, however, it is OK to eat it with an
	imaginary companion,
and that he himself had enjoyed memorable porridges with edmund 
	spenser and john milton. 
even if such porridges are not as wholesome as keats claims, still, you 
	can learn something from them.
yesterday morning, for instance, keats told me about writing the
	'ode to a nightingale.'
he had a heck of a time finishing it--those were his words--"oi 'ad an 
	'eck of a toime," he said, more or less, speaking through his 
	porridge.
he wrote it quickly, on scraps of paper, which he then stuck in his
	pocket, 
but when he got home he couldn't figure out the order of the
	stanzas, and he and a friend spread the papers on a table, and 
	they made some sense of them, but but he isn't sure to this day if 
	they got it right.
he still wonders about the occasional sense of drift between stanzas,
and the way here and there a line will go into the configuration of a
	moslem at prayer, then raise itself up and peer about, and then 
	lay itself down slightly off the mark, causing the poem to move
	forward with god's reckless wobble. 
he said someone told him later in life wordsworth heard about
	the scraps of paper on the table and tried shuffling some stanzas
	of his own but only made matters worse.
when breakfast was over, john recited 'to autumn.'
he recited it slowly, with much feeling, and he articulated the words
	lovingly, and his odd accent sounded sweet. 
he didn't offer the story of writing 'to autumn,' i doubt there is 
	much of one. 
but he did say the sight of a just-harvested oat field got him started
	on it
and two of the lines, "for summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy
	cells" and "thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours,"
	came to him while eating oatmeal alone.
i can see him--drawing a spoon through the stuff, gazing into the
	glimmering furrows, muttering--and it occurs to me:
maybe there is no sublime, only the shining of the amnion's tatters.
for supper tonight i am going to have a baked potato left over from
	lunch.
i am aware that a leftover baked potato is damp, slippery, and 
	simultaneously gummy and crumbly,
and therefore i'm going to invite patrick kavanagh to join me.
-galway kinnell