I first saw Lisa Ress's “Setting the Table, Eating What is Served” in
the Washington Prize announcement in Poets
& Writers (March/April 1988) and was blown away. Some years later Lisa
came to teach at Knox and we became good friends, and she’s allowed me to crib
some lines from the poem in two different novels. I couldn’t find any other
words that would to the job. The poem appears in Lisa's Object Relations.