Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
If you can read, you can cook:
my mothers’ motto from the day
I learned to crack an egg on the rim
of a bowl and separate the whites
from yolks. Powders to leaven and sift,
oils to ease; sugar to make sweet, salt
to temper all with a trace of tears—
Cake for the kitchen gods; but for you,
burnt crust at the bottom of the pan
to remind the greedy mouth
of the world’s tough hide
and bitter rind.
In response to Via Negativa: Short order cook.
Dearest one, how could I forget
how long this jaunt has lasted?
We crossed and recrossed the little
passages, shielded the small
golden flowers from the approaching
haboob. We argued with the moon
and her hundred incarnations.
No one drowned on our watch,
only stumbled from craning up
so much toward the darkness.
I think it is no weakness
to confess our love
of starry configurations,
how we plot our movements
by the shambled remnants
of their distant light.
In response to Via Negativa: Primary sources.
It collapsed upon itself from so much complexity.
The leaves that formed the hedges, uniform in size and shape, decided to grow new veins and stippled variations.
Someone installed a mobile of paper cranes under the blue awning of sky.
One way traffic, all left turns.
X marks the spot where, a long time ago, a red sweater came unravelled.
Every once in a while a peacock flashes its jeweled fan; this is called flirting.
Persistence is rewarded by a flask of ginebra and a matadora’s muleta.
Danger lurks where you most expect it.
The soil is your nearest radio station: this is why they say Keep your ear to the ground.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
And I had not kissed the melting snows
on the edge of a foreign river, nor walked
yet in the chill of frost-layered fields—
so when birds called in the plaza, it was
their chorus purpled of bells and market
smells that brought me to tears—
The heat that rose from the cobblestones
was saffron and sawdust, mantling our heels
and their calloused cupolas—
And it was the women, old and young or ageless,
the way they bent their heads conversing
over laundry, braiding each other’s hair—
How familiar was everything, at the same
time how strange and swift in passing,
in their utter transformation—
One moment the crisp and beautiful sleeve
all starched and white, the next a curtain
tossing violently in icy wind—
In response to thus: small stone (264).
What is original then if everything
that has happened to us has happened
to someone else before? Every great love
the same love but also the only one,
every death the same death that couldn’t
have brought the universe to a halt but did,
that couldn’t have made you speechless, heart
stopped in its tracks, every nerve burning
its uncurtained filaments in a lighthouse
at the end of the pier— Rich green, slippery
with moss: whose names are these, carved
into planks and on the faces of stones?
In response to Via Negativa: Palimpsest.
During the war, his grandmother was part of what they used to call a concert brigade. Once she sang at a programme that included the legendary Oistrakh. Bombs were falling through the sky, the city in ruins; and yet people came to listen, those who were not yet dead, those who refused to be done in by their daily ration of half a roll of dry brown bread, one cube of sugar, a hundred grams of vodka for courage. Snow fell, or freezing rain; and who anymore had good clothes? But they curled up like leaves in the shabby remnants of theatres, clutching their threadbare coats to their sides. They pressed their fingers to their cheeks as if they could inflate them with breath, as if the cadenzas might lead to a birth chamber— They would tumble like newborns into a world flooded with light: no echoes of guns, only a clearing in a birch forest filling with the cries of resurrected birds.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Farmer’s daughter, I
never knew what it was
to live alone for more
than twenty years, to live
in a house other than the one
my late husband the judge
took me to fifty years ago,
me no longer a new bride
but still thin-waisted,
hair lustrous enough to shape
into a beehive. I had cat’s-eye
spectacles, and I could pencil
a beauty mark on my cheek.
I did not have to figure
a tax return, did not have
my own bank account. My fingers
flew at the Singer sewing machine,
my feet sure on the treadle, working
on notions, silk, pin money. The wives
and daughters of mayors and councilors
sought out my smooth Peter Pan collars,
my keyhole necklines, the sharp darts
that lifted their breasts to daring.
I learned their common language at tea
and soirees, learned to buss on the cheeks,
Darling, sweetheart, always a pleasure
to be here and see you. Now I am shrill
at eighty, clutching my purse and keys
to my chest, never letting them out of sight.
I don’t understand piety anymore— no matter
how often I recite the prayers, they are bitter
and loud, louder than the wind in the trees
and their echo without cease in my ears.
In response to Via Negativa: Esprit de corps.
to smolder and smear:
everything serviceable
as kindling— paper, wood
shavings; promises, lies,
joss sticks, posturing.
The hard become soft,
treasure of coal with its heart
of burning coral. Blown breath
in the cupped half-cove
of darkness, fire in the belly
that must never go out—
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Oh ruminants that docile stand
on pasture-land and long green meadow,
when I think of how you lower your heads
through the day to the sweet nuzzle of grass
and how you wear a halter of sunlight mostly
loosely across your backs, I give pause
which I want to think of as a kind of thanks
before I turn my hand or mouth toward the tasks
of domestic transformation. Someone else
has rendered skin and gristle and bone, taken
abstractions of flesh: marbled slabs and glistening
circles that mean a form of sustenance, in other
instances a surplus of meanings beyond food—
The waiter in the chophouse recites the many
different virtues of Kobe beef as if it were
an epic poem, and the impeccably dressed diners
look slightly flushed, as if they were in
the presence of a holy object— They lean
in to inspect the thin filet. But we
are closer than they could imagine, chain
after chain linked in a web going around the world:
water where fish leap and shining insects hover,
smaller creatures that flatten their ears, attentive
to the vocation of predators in field and sky.
Block after block of homes, in each a pretty kitchen
with appliances humming to themselves in the dark;
and copper-clad pots and metal implements bright
as the day they were bought, knowing nothing yet
except water and soap: knowing nothing yet of how
the largest basin is wide enough to catch the major
organs lifted out of the cavity: heart, liver, spleen;
sweetbreads bathed in blood like ink that stains the fingers.
In response to Via Negativa: Gated community.
Tonight I filled
a whole volume
with a clutch
of coughing,
which my oldest
book of illustrated
ailments said
was surely
the prologue
to an archive
of wind-related
afflictions—
There being
nothing left
to do but wait
and count,
I slipped
off my shoes,
rested in
an armchair
and agreed
to be fed a thick
slice of toast,
sprinkled with
brown sugar.
In response to Via Negativa: Anarchist's Dream.