Tag Archives: food

DECEMBER ZUIHITSU

DECEMBER ZUIHITSU


It is easier to awaken in the dark of winter. The body opens slowly, warms slowly with Qi Gong practice, with hot coffee. The summer body is restless, quick, easily exhausted.

Why must my study be the coldest room in the house? From the windows I watch bare ash trees and brushy hemlock trees moving slightly in the North wind, dark against a silver sky. Sometimes a feeling of desperation. The weather, the news. The way my hips still hurt.

Driving into town we pass a herd of young horses racing across a frosty pasture. We agree that it must be a wonderful thing to be a young horse on a cold morning.

On weekends, the woman who calls herself The Lady From the Gravel Company sells Christmas trees for her son who is out West hunting deer. She hopes he doesn’t get one, she told me, because already she has two deer and a bear in her freezer.

The dog wants to eat her scraps on the living room carpet. The old cat wants the young cat’s food. The young cat wants the old cat’s food. My husband wants cooked chicken thighs. I want Rasta Pasta. At supper, I find the jalapeño pepper that had disappeared into the stew. Water does not put out that kind of fire.

Strange bedside fellows:  Neil Gaiman and Barbara Pym. I expect she could write about him: a mysterious man with tousled hair, much admired by excellent women. I cannot imagine what he could write about her.

The dog must go out in the dark again to see if the fiend who hides under the steps is still hiding under the steps and to see if every deer track down the driveway was made by the same deer. I must go out with her to see the moon and to listen for the owl who sits in the oak tree behind the house.

JUST ASKING

JUST ASKING

Why do you keep feeding us?
We don’t give you much:
a few bones, some onion skins,
now and then something like
a token of pinecones and twigs
or a lanyard we made at camp.

You’re tired, I know.
You look tired. And old.
All those wrinkles and cracks.
And you don’t smell so good,
not any more, 
not even after the rain.

What happened to your jewels—
those little birds and buggy things?
Are you letting yourself go?
I wouldn’t blame you
since we don’t seem to care much
about how you look, or what you do.

And where would you go?
And when we’re hungry,
where will we?


Thanksgiving, 2022

words: SIX TREASURED THINGS: A ZUIHITSU

rigid   draw    meadow   peer     lemon       cap

(another one with those words)

 

 

SIX TREASURED THINGS:  A ZUIHITSU

1. A rigid plastic lawn chair, one of four that my parents kept on the deck of their condominium. I keep it on the front step from spring till snow.  I sit there at sunrise and sunset, watching the yellow light flicker like sparks between the leaves.

2.  The white linen cap I bought in Traverse City in a shop that sold hats and, unexpectedly, wine-making supplies. A young friend told me that when I wear it, I remind him of Yoko Ono. I wear it often.

3. Our backyard. It was forest, then meadow, then lawn, and it is now growing up again into forest. We’ve reserved a patch of grass around the house, and bits for vegetables and flowers, but what was barren lawn is filling up with grasses and goldenrod, bramble and sumac, gray dogwood and pine and oak. Five years ago, I planted one solemn young chestnut tree as an act of defiance.

4.The drawing of a cat we had for a few months. Her name was Nanette, and she was tri-colored, and very small. The old woman who gave her to us could not keep her. “There’s something wrong with her,” she told us, and there was. In the drawing, Nanette is curled, sleeping, in a chair that once was in the living room and is now in the kitchen. The drawing was made by an artist friend who stayed with us for a summer—along with her husband and three children—in the room that once was our guest room, and is now the study where I write.

5. The lemons I always have by me. Here is a new maxim I try to live by: When in doubt, add lemon. To vegetables, to pastas, to soda water, to soup. The scent of lemon revives me and a lick of lemon opens my senses to all the good in the world that remains. 

6. Ursula Le Guin wrote “There was nothing she could do, but there was always the next thing to be done.” I treasure a company of peers—poets, artists, women who keep doing the next thing, and the next thing, and the next.

Words: By Way of Contrast

coffeepot

filigree

chase

novel

 

BY WAY OF CONTRAST

Grandmother’s silver coffeepot—

fine filigree around the handle,

chasing and repoussé patterning the lid.

The matching creamer, 

sugarbowl with tongs.

Her white linen napkins,

bone china cups.

 

My Mr. Coffee maker.

My red ceramic sugar bowl

patterned with spirals and stars. 

My white creamer—novel souvenier

from Columbus, Ohio.

My red-checked tablecloth.

My heavy blue pottery mug.

March Prompt #7: The Chair that was First Owned by my Great-Great Uncle Asa

THE CHAIR THAT WAS FIRST OWNED BY MY GREAT-GREAT UNCLE ASA

March Prompt #7

He wasn’t actually my uncle. He was my cousin’s uncle, on the other side of her family, you see, but we called him uncle because of that chair. It was passed on to my cousin’s Great Aunt Martha (not my great-aunt, just hers) who was his second daughter-in-law, and she passed it on to her son Freddy, who of course was my cousin’s actual uncle. He was the youngest in that family. Johnny, the middle one, married a Brady girl, and we have, at least my husband has, connections to the Bradys since his sister-in-law’s first husband was a Brady, and her oldest daughter. She didn’t marry his brother till he died. My husband’s. brother. Anyway, Freddy—my cousin’s real Uncle Freddy but we all called him that, used to come to Thanksgiving at my Aunt Bet’s. She was my cousin’s mother, Dad’s sister. So he was my uncle’s brother by marriage. He was the oldest.  Never married. No one ever said why, but we have our suspicions. And one Thanksgiving, when he sat down at the table on that rickety old chair—you know how everybody has to haul out all the chairs at Thanksgiving if there’s a big crowd and there was always a big crowd at Aunt Bet’s since she and Dad were two of seven and Uncle John—not the John who married the Brady girl—that was Freddy’s brother—my uncle who was Aunt Bet’s husband had the same name—  was one of four and by then they all had kids, except Uncle Freddy, and she always took in strays besides. People, I mean, but she did take in some cats, too, but mostly they stayed up in the barn except that orange one that everybody called Blink because it was missing an eye. But he sat on that old chair and even though he was pretty skinny it broke under him. Bumped his head on the edge of the table on his way down. We all laughed, and so did he, but he was never the same after. Neither was the chair, so Uncle John threw the chair in the fire and Uncle Freddy had to sit on a stack of apple crates they hauled in from the shed.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE HOUSESITTER

INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE HOUSESITTER

If the door has blown closed, open it.

You do not need a key.

Feed the birds.

There is seed in the blue jar.

 

Pick the apples, eat the cherries.

Make wine from the grapes.

Do not eat the yellow pears

for they are bitter.

 

The garden is full

of deep green weeds.

Cook them in oil.

They will make you strong.

 

When dew shines on the leaves

go out and wet your feet.

The copper basin holds rainwater

to wash your hair.

 

Milk the goats

at sunrise and sunset.

Drink what you like

and make the cheese.

 

The dogs will kiss

you awake.

The cats will sing

you to sleep.

 

They will tell you

what they wish to eat.

They will tell you

what to dream.

 

At midnight,

the owls will come.

The great gray owl

will speak. Listen.

THREE TABLES

April prompts #31

A Food poem

Janice’s #6

THREE TABLES

You haven’t seen all of Warsaw, but you’ve seen three tables.

~Cousin Gosia

 

Cold Chłodnik (you say “whahd-neek”) green with dill.

And Smacznego. The white linen cloth. Plates

of meat and cheeses, salad of tomato

and greens, mushrooms because it’s the season,

Celinka’s pierożki with more mushrooms.

Thick slices of seeded bread and special rolls

from the bakery at the corner, and butter,

and rose petal jam (say “rose petal jam”).

A basket of paper napkins with red,

white and blue stripes in your honor. Gosia’s

blueberry pierogi. Coka-cola, apple juice

because Dominik will run a marathon,

the narrow glasses of vodka or Jarek’s

soul-cleansing mixture, which surely does.

The salty oscypek made by mountain

people. Pickles, ogórków and mushroom.

You are full. Language, and why did Babcia

Florentia go to Cleveland and why

did Frieda stay and why did the Russians

shoot Rudolf on the front steps of the house

where they were born?  And the puppy plays

on the floor with the children who have been

excused. Two hours and you are really

full. And in comes Jola with her handsome sons

and she has brought a dish of corn and cream

just for you because you do not eat meat,

and a cheesecake and a mazurek filled

with raisins and walnuts and frosted with

chocolate and this is your family and Edek

fills your glass again and na zdrowie.

And you eat.

NAME THE PLACE

NAME THE PLACE

 

. . if you can, where a woman in black velvet

wears a hat constructed from balloons.

Before a roaring fire,

people are singing Nowell.

 

Banjo and fiddle, washtub bass and guitar

echo through the hall.

Now everyone is singing

“Feeling Groovy.”

 

An aproned man carves turkey.

A woman offers a bowl of potatoes.

Boys and girls run to and fro

bearing pitchers, and plates of cake.

 

A magician pulls

a rainbow from his mouth

while children shout

words to make it real.

 

Everyone is there:

a man who recently bought oxen,

the one who took a wife,

a woman from the highway,

 

a beggar from the hedge.

a man most inappropriately dressed,

Santa Claus, and look!

there’s that maiden, all in blue.