Poem at 3 AM with Leftovers and Rilke

This is how the body speaks— of its thirst or hunger,
its pangs wrought by memory or a full bladder rousing you 
from sleep at 3 AM. The house breathes the way some places do, 
a kind of engine humming in the background. You walk downstairs
to the kitchen in your bare feet for a drink of ice water, then 
give in to the urge to snack on leftover dim sum from dinner 
at Jade Villa just hours ago— four round tables lined up 
to make one long one, talk mingled with the smells of leek, 
chili oil, pressed duck, and the deep orange clutch of chicken 
feet marinated in soy and jalapeno, steamed until any memory 
of them scrabbling through gravel has melted almost unctuously 
away; and one of the students who won the essay prize at school 
is shyly dipping her soup spoon into a bowl of noodles 
and the other is cheerfully and efficiently clicking 
her chopsticks from one dish to another, everyone else 
reaching in, too, for flavor. The poets on the farthest 
end of the table are laughing and the visiting scholar 
on the other end is trading jokes with the futures trader, 
and no one quite notices when the waiters come to fill 
and replenish cups of water and tea. Your colleague 
is rhapsodizing over the thick clouds of chicken and corn 
in the soup, and you give your whole mind to all of this, 
for here as in the world attention is a practice that asks 
nothing from you except to be here. When you walk back
into the night and the air is cooler and all are hugging 
and waving goodbye or someone is suggesting you find 
somewhere else to go and have margaritas, you know 
the world is waiting to slip into your mouth again— 
another kind of communion, the kind you have 
every day, the kind that stains your fingers and leaves 
a slight film of oil, even now in this kitchen where, 
standing barefoot on cold tile, already you are chewing 
on the future. You know you will be tested by one more 
terrible thing or another, just as Rilke said the purpose 
of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things— 
let's say love or unavoidable circumstance— which molds you 
and gives you the chance to do this work for which all other 
is but a preparation. Not despair, but training; the practice 
of lifting what you can, then being lifted by what you cannot. 
Days and nights feed you so you can wake and feed others, 
so you give in again, opening your mouth to say yes.