Pot roast

   My mother wasn’t a cook
with a gourmet repertoire,
but no one made a better pot roast.
   Even better than the Jersey diner
pot roast she loved, as much
for its heft as for its sides:
Parker House rolls, iceberg
salad, a single slice of tomato
robed across its top.
   Her pot roast was a magnificence
of meat, crisp-edged, fat-ribboned,
surrendered to the nudge of fork,
her potatoes poetry, pillow of noodles
sauce-stained onion-dark.
   During my beloved art class,
I’d dream about the meal, then run, galoshes
stomping through snow,
up the long hill home.
   I wanted the pot roast,
but more than that,
I wanted the woman making it.
Delighted for a day away
from her typewriter’s clack.
   A sorceress stirring
the silver pot,
hair starched and hived,
stockingless feet busy
in high heels.