Every This and That

ULYSSIPPO
WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Does Ben's view resemble that of Ulysses,
3000 years ago or so?

According to legend, Ulysses / Odysseus was the founder
of Lisbon, thus the linguistic connection between the hero's
name and city's ancient name of Ulyssippo, Olissipona,
Olisipo [sometimes with double "ss" or double "pp"], or Lissabon
Once again (see preceding post OXB), I'm grateful to Ben and Cathleen, who not only shared their vacation photographs but also picked out this inspirational souvenir for me:

Featuring clockwise from top:
Cesario Verde, Fernando Pessoa (with glasses),
Luis de Camoes (with laurel wreath),
Florbela Espanca, Mario de Sa-Carneiro
First in the anthology comes Luis de Camoes (1524 - June 10, 1580), a poet so important to the language and people of Portugal that the day of his death is observed annually as Portugal's National Day. Camoes is the author of Portugal's national epic poem The Lusiads. This saga recounts the adventues of the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama who sets sail from Lisbon, accompanied by a cast of classical gods, heroes, and muses:

From Canto IV: The Departure
Amidst a noble roar of eager cries
in Lisbon’s harbour – where renowned Ulysses
made berth; where into briny Neptune spills
the Tagus its sweet liquor and white sands –
the ships stand yare at last; and not a fear
bridles from youthful show of zeal the crews,
for these seafaring men with men of Mars
will follow me, across the very globe.

Up from the beaches come the soldiers, clad
in diverse styles and colors, all as much
trimmed in desirousness to brave the world
and seek new regions out. Aloft, calm winds
billow with gentle swells the flags flown high
on our proud carracks, which, as they behold
the seas' expanse, promise one day to rise,
as Argos' ship before, to Olympus, stars.

Camoes was also the author of numerous sonnets. The autobiographical message of this one, for example, captures the introspecitve tone of his lyric poetry:

My own mistakes, cruel fortune, and love's flame
devised a plot together to undo me.
Mistakes and fortune were a surfeit to me;
Love alone would have done for me the same.

I'm past it; yet I still feel the excess
of pain so freshly now from troubles past,
that from their sorry rage I've learned at last
never to take desires for happiness.

The whole tale of my years, I was mistaken,
and with my groundless hopes I did my part
to earn my troubles; Fortune was no cheat.

I've known no love but flashes of deceit.
Oh if some power only would awaken
the vengeance that could sate my hardened heart!

Camoes looks at the passing of time with a similar honesty, concluding in puzzlement rather than nostalgia:

The times change, the desires change, and who
we are, and what we trust, keeps changing with them;
the whole world is composed of change's rhythm,
forever shifting qualities anew.

Constantly we see new things, every this
and that showing our guess was ill - attuned;
and when they bring us hurt, we keep the wound,
while what was good (if anything), we miss.

Time cloaks the ground in green, where it before
lay covered underneath the snowy cold;
in me, it turns to tears what was sweet song.

And as these daily changings pass along,
another change amazes me still more:
things don't change now the way they changed of old.

Camoes' amazement -- that even change itself is subject to change -- reminds me of the Charles Durning's amusing and bemused Thanksgiving prayer in Home for the Holidays:

" . . . even things we hated
. . . are starting to stop
. . . and they shouldn't."
In any age, it seems, despite our preferences, change is the way of the world. Modernist Lisbon poet Fernando Pessoa (1888 – 1935) repeats the same lament in no uncertain terms:

". . . for change is what I hate,
and something I do not want. . . ."
~ from "I suffer Lydia" ~

and

" . . . Provided life does not weary,
I'll let life pass slowly by,
on the condition that I stay the same. . . ."
~ from "I prefer roses" ~

Photo by Cathleen ~ Ponta Delgada, Azores
[Click for More Tile Art]

Another favorite from Fernando Pessoa:

With one eye on the past
some see which they cannot see,
whilst others in the future see
that which cannot be seen.

Why go so far, look closer!
What is freedom? The day is here!
This is the hour, the moment;
and this moment is who we are and that is that.

Forever flowing, the eternal hour
reveals our insignificance.
In a single gasp we live and die, so seize the day,
for the day is simply who you are.

In the coming weeks, I will look more closely at the work of Camoes and Pessoa, as well as the remaining three poets whose work comprise this enlightening and often heart-breaking volume of verse. Thanks to Cathleen and Ben for opening my eyes to the poetry of Portugal.

Belated Honeymoon

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Wednesday, August 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Light as a Feather

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful,
or believe to be beautiful. ~William Morris

Beautiful and useful: my favorite china pattern
~ Chinese Legend (pastel Blue Willow with red accents) ~
which looks perfect against red silk elephants from Thailand!
Thanks Sandy S-K!

Or this exotic white / gold / silver summer bedding ensemble
from the United Arab Emirates. Thanks Vickie Amador!

*******************

For one thing,
there is too much luggage,
and you’re truly lugging it —
you and, it seems, everyone.

What is it, that you need so badly?
Think about this.

from the poem "Logan International"
by Mary Oliver
in her book Thirst
Now, what to do about all those items that are neither beautiful nor useful? Somehow it seems that life has become a perpetual project of sorting the wheat from the chaff, trying to ~ simplify, simplify, simplify ~ by donating or throwing away. Mary Oliver's question ~ "What is it, that you need so badly?" ~ reminds me of the old Egyptian rule that you could only enter the afterworld if Osiris weighed your heart and found it to be lighter than a feather.

This ancient legend received a new twist in the 1983 Sesame Street special, Don't Eat the Pictures (which I mentioned last month on my Quotidian Blog). Cookie Monster and friends spend the night -- In a Museum! -- the Metropolitan Museum of Art -- and meet a little Egyptian prince who haunts the Temple of Dendur because he is under a spell that prevents him from joining his parents in the afterlife.

Big Bird, Mr. Snuffleupagus, and Prince Sahu
Snuffy offers Sahu a ride, and Big Bird sings a hopeful song::

"You're Gonna Be a Star"
Shining in the sky
Bright and proud, way up high.
You're gonna be a star
Somewhere in the blue
There's a spot just for you!

The moon will be there beside you
When everyone's counting sheep
A fluffy white cloud will hide you
Whenever you go to sleep

A shiny little star
Is what you're gonna be--
Just you wait and see!

You're gonna be a star
Shining in the sky
Bright and proud, way up high.
You're gonna be a star
Somewhere in the blue
There's a spot just for you!

At night when the sky is clearing
You'll talk with the other stars
I bet you'll be overhearing
What Jupiter said to Mars!

A shiny little star
Is what you're gonna be--
Just you wait and see!

Standing Before Osiris With a Heavy Heart

*******************
My heart was not lighter than feather twelve years ago, when we made the big move from Philadelphia back to Indiana (in Spring 2004). When we first moved out to Philly (from Indiana, in Spring 1993), we didn't have so much to take with us, but we managed to accumulate a lot in our eleven years there, and it couldn't all come back to the Midwest with us. When packing, I tried to put all of our belongings to the "light as a feather" test. If they failed, then they did not get to accompany us to our next life!

In preparation for that move, I bid farewell to stacks of old bedspreads and beach towels (including two big black garbage bags full to our vet, who was collecting nesting material to make snug winter beds for the pets), tons of books (some via amazon used), a couple of poorly made small bookshelves and scratched up end tables, video cassettes, Sam's outgrown clothes (previously worn by Ben), Christmas decorations (yes, I was able to part with one large shopping bag of the cheaper, plastic variety -- none of my treasures, of course), a few puzzles and games and toys that I didn't think Ben and Sam would ever play with again. One way or another, it all made its way out the door -- over to St. Peter's School (some, that I knew the little kids would like, went straight to the Pre - K; some to the basement for the next year's annual rummage sale), or to our local Goodwill equivalent -- a store called the Second Mile Center, or to the curbside -- an extremely efficient market for the transference of goods in Philadelphia.

It's true, I cried real tears over some of the special toys, like the wooden zoo that had simply never appealed to the boys, even though to me it had represented the ideal hands - on childhood experience that I dreamed of creating for them. I guess that's the hard part -- not just boxing up the stuff, but passing on the dreams in hopes that someone else will find a use for them. It wasn't easy at first, but once I got going, I felt good about the idea of not bringing so much excess baggage back to Indiana! It's always tough for a sentimental fool like me to part with my belongings but always nice to lighten the load. When we arrived in Indiana, more things had to go; despite our heavy - duty downsizing, we realized we had still brought too much.

We've now been back in Indiana for as long as were in Philadelphia (a year longer, actually), so it is definitely time for another purge. A few of my friends swear by the latest trend: Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing; but I think between William Morris ("beautiful or useful") and the Tao of Big Bird ("lighter than a feather") I have all the inspiration I need. (I have also been intrigued by Kate Bingaman-Burt's Obsessive Consumption: What Did You Buy Today? -- a kind of "pain of payment" awareness - raising project, like the practice of meticulously verifying every credit card purchase or, better yet, using cash instead of credit.)

I like what my friend Len wrote a couple of summers ago about growing lighter and lighter as he gave away his earthly goods:

I enjoyed clearing out my closets of all the clothes I haven't worn since I moved to this house three years ago: sports jackets, pants, ties, regular jackets, shoes obtained online that never fit well, the ugly, the old-fashioned, the back-up administrating garb, the inexplicable purchases. I dropped these off at the donation center and then went back to give them the bicycle. In this mood, I began clearing expired foods (making an emergency batch of tofu-tidbits just six hours away from expiring--my name is Danger!). I plan not to go beyond my house and backyard tomorrow: there is so much more to cull, clean, and clear out, now that I am in this groove.

Tabula rasa: I had to replace my old, dying cellphone; the young technician supposedly copying the contacts and calendar and other information from my old phone suddenly panicked when he saw I did not have a "cloud app." He had to make a call to someone and kept trying. After five attempts, he handed it to me in triumph and said it was perfect; he said I should have told him I had deleted my contacts! In keeping with my general cleaning and emptying, I took the blank phone as an opportunity: gone were all of the people and places I had for short-term purposes, from different places I had lived, from my administrative work. Gone were the retired, the moved, the unpleasant, and the dead. It was as if a great cleansing religious ceremony had been undertaken and my contacts now were made pure. I start from this beginning and add as needed. . . .

Plus Some Witty Facebook Responses:
Denice Laws Davies: "I felt that way after giving away my teenage record collection."

Diane Prokop: You are a brave man.

Leonard Orr: "Bravery does not enter into it. There was not much that could be done. I think the best analogy is Leopold Bloom's rising above the adversities of his life through "equanimity," before he goes to sleep at the end of Ulysses."

Diane Prokop: "I am a stranger to equanimity these days."

Andrea Livingston: "I like the idea of deleting all "unpleasant" contacts from my cellphone's memory and sending them to a "cloud" somewhere, similar to what happened in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind."

Kitti: "My favorite: 'inexplicable purchases'! I also like this list; there's just something about it that I keep returning to: 'Gone were the retired, the moved, the unpleasant, and the dead.' "

Leonard: "Separated out, it does sound idyllic (or an echo of the end of Dubliners)."

Kitti Carriker: Or the preface of Edwin Mullhouse
(see Comment below)

P.S.
Here's an even better way to decrease our accumulations
and the task of ridding ourselves of them --
don't buy them in the first place!

"Look at your own mind.
The one who carries things thinks he's got things,
but the one who looks on sees only the heaviness.
Throw away things, lose them, and find lightness."
~ Ajahn Chah ~
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Tuesday, June 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT ~ Willow Willow Willow
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST ~ The Swedish Death Cleanse
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Longly, Longingly

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Lady Lavery Banknote

James Joyce Banknote

Why can't the United States of America ever have writers
on our paper money like Ireland and England?
In a novel of so many unforgettable lines and phrases, one passage more than any other stood out for me when I first read Joyce's Ulysses as an undergraduate. It was this:

"A warm shock of air heat of mustard hanched on Mr Bloom's heart. He raised his eyes and met the stare of a bilious clock. Two. Pub clock five minutes fast. Time going on. Hands moving. Two. Not yet.

His midriff yearned then upward, sank within him, yearned more longly longingly.

Wine."~ James Joyce, Ulysses, 172 - 73

The ache in Bloom's midriff brought to mind a few lines from a poem that I had loved back in highschool:

"I felt a soft caving in my stomach
As at the top of the highest slide
When I had been a child, but was not afraid . . ."

~ John Logan, "The Picnic"
So unexpected to encounter in fiction, poetry, or otherwise, such a visceral sensation described so accurately -- and the word longly -- had I ever heard it before? I don't think so. Though I've never fancied myself a poet, Joyce's strong, sad imagery inspired me to attempt my own rendition of heartache in the gut:

The Ache You Wear

You fall into her arms like crying,
feel her lips in your hair,
soothing like a parent
and something else.

Wooden and broken,
you lean rigidly.
Your forehead rests against breasts
which must be like your own.

With each soft motion,
the ache you wear like a brace
begins to melt, drips
slowly down your back.

Like congestion, it seeps inside,
fills the space between every rib,
then tatters into loose bits
that choke upward and sink within you.

Yearning for a familiarity,
you move toward this woman
and this one comfort
after taking leave of him.

For this time you fall away
from any pain.
Thick rags are floating
now in your stomach.

As connection and coincidence would have it, I recently came across the following within just a few months of each other:

1." . . . The feeling
resembles lumps of raw dough

weighing down a child’s stomach on baking day.
Or Rilke said it, ‘My heart. . .
Could I say of it, it overflows
with bitterness . . . but no, as though

its contents were simply balled into
formless lumps, thus
do I carry it about.’ . . . "

~ Denise Levertov, "Life At War"
2. "The pain he had felt in his chest after breakfast was gone: in its place he now had in his middle a curious, dry, empty, swollen feeling. As if he carried something inside him, hollow, but beyond his size and growing bigger."

~ Jessamyn West, Friendly Persuasion, 73
3. "For weeks, thinking of that made me feel like a chute had opened in my stomach and my heart was descending through it."

~ Curtis Sittenfeld, American Wife, 20
4. "This is what I liked about my friends: just sitting around and telling stories. . . . I couldn't help but think about school and everything else ending. I liked standing just outside the couches and watching them -- it was kind of sad I didn't mind, and so I just listened, letting all the happiness and the sadness of this ending swirl around in mine, each sharpening the other. For the longest time, it felt kind of like my chest was cracking open, but not precisely in an unpleasant way."

~ John Green, Paper Towns, 215
5. "They were nowhere near butterflies in the stomach. They were electric bricks. They sunk. They zapped. They made me want to keel over."

~ Heather Kirn Lanier, Teaching in the Terrordome, 37
6. "You wake up and you feel -- what? Heaviness, an ache inside, a weight, yes. A soft crumpling of flesh. A feeling like all the surfaces have been rubbed raw."

~ Carolyn Parkhurst, The Dogs of Babel, (252)
(see Highlights from 2006 & 2007)


7. "But in a few minutes it was back again,
that ugly jagged ache beneath her rib cage."

Suzanne Berne, A Perfect Arrangement, 212

*******************

Not unlike the sunset:
" . . . all the happiness and the sadness of this ending swirl . . . "

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Saturday, November 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
~ Longly, Longingly my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Parallax

A MUSEUM & LIBRARY WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

THE ROSENBACH:
"A WONDERLAND FOR LOVERS OF BOOKS AND ANTIQUES"
Two special days this week:

Tuesday, June 14th: Flag Day, since way back in 1777 (officially established in 1916).

Thursday, June 16th: Bloomsday, ever since 1922, (officially established in 1954).

My maternal grandmother, Rovilla Heidemann Lindsey, died forty - five years ago today, on Flag Day in 1966. That year, like this year, June 14 fell on a Tuesday; and Grandma Lindsey's funeral service was held on Thursday, June 16.


Her husband, my maternal grandfather, Paul Jones Lindsey, died seventeen years later, on Saturday, June 11, almost to the day of my grandmother's death, but not quite. His funeral, however, was also held on the Thursday, June 16. For all those intervening 17 years, Grandpa kept the 1966 calendar hanging on the kitchen wall, turned to June. Every January, he would place the new one on top, but you could always see the 1966 calendar just underneath.

By the time 1983 rolled around, I had read James Joyce's Ulysses several times, studied it thoroughly, and worked as an intern on the James Joyce Quarterly. I was well aware of Bloomsday that summer and the literary significance of my grandparents' two funerals being held not only on the same day of the week and month as each other's, but also on the anniversary of Leopold Bloom's legendary day in Dublin ~ Thursday, June 16, 1904 ~ when he too attended a funeral ceremony. The uncanny coincidence was not lost on me.

I sent a letter to my undergraduate Joyce professor, Jim Barnes, telling him of my grandfather's Bloomsday funeral service and sharing with him the remarkable symmetry of my grandmother's funeral taking place seventeen years earlier, also on Thursday, June 16, way before I knew anything about Bloomsday. I was honored when he wrote back to let me know that he read my note aloud to his Joyce students that summer, as an example of how life can echo art. [My previous posts on Professor & Poet Jim Barnes include: Missouri Poets, Quinton Duval, Tomatoes & Gravy]


I guess that's why I can never let Bloomsday slip by unnoticed, especially when it falls, as it does this year, on a Thursday, something which happens at repeating intervals of every 6 - 11 - 6 - 5 / 6 -11 - 6 - 5 years. If you get a kick (as I do!) out of the Perpetual Calendar, you can easily figure out that the next time June 16 will fall on a Thursday is 2016 (then add 6, 11, 6, 5, and so forth, in order to identify the years to come).

Googling "Bloomsday" has led me to another Quotidian blogger (no! I didn't steal my name from him). Interestingly, he maintains that June 16 can really only be considered Bloomsday when it falls on a Thursday, i.e., every 6, 11, 6, 5 years or so! Calendrically, this idea appeals to me, though it seems a shame to pass up a yearly opportunity to visit the nearest Irish pub -- or perhaps the Rosenbach Museum & Library, if you happen to be in Philadelphia -- in celebration of the life and times and peregrinations of Leopold Bloom.

Bloomsday at the Rosenbach,
#2008 & #2010 Delancey Street, Philadelphia
**************************************

Some Quotations for Bloomsday, by Joyce and others,
in honor of wandering the streets of Dublin, or wherever:
It is the epic of two races (Israel-Ireland) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life)... It is also a kind of encyclopaedia. My intention is not only to render the myth sub specie temporis nostri but also to allow each adventure (that is, every hour, every organ, every art being interconnected and interrelated in the somatic scheme of the whole) to condition and even to create its own technique.
James Joyce (Irish novelist, 1882-1941)
Letters, 21st September 1920

"Think you're escaping and run into yourself.
Longest way round is the shortest way home."
James Joyce, from Ulysses, Chapter 13

"Who is it that can tell me who I am?"
William Shakespeare, from King Lear

"And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive
where we started and know the place for the first time."
T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"

"Happy Bloomsday, citizens, phenomenologists, throwaways, foreigners, gentlemen of the press, evermoving wanderers, weavers and unweavers, pedestrians in brown macintoshes, Wandering Soap, sailors crutching around corners, no-one, everyone! Hoping you're well and not in hell!"
Kathleen O'Gorman, my friend and fellow Modernist

P.S. Is reading Ulysses still on your "to do" list?
Well, for a few milliseconds of entertainment, you can
enjoy this minimalist version: it will quickly bring you
up to speed, or serve as a quick review if it's been awhile:
Ulysses for Dummies
Haha!

P.P.S. End of June 2012: my mother has written to let me know that her first cousin Mildred (my grandmother's niece) died earlier this month, on June 14th & the funeral was held on June 16th.

P.P.P.S. Bloomsday 2015: thanks to Michael Lipsey for this amazing photograph: "Happy Bloomsday! The inside cover of my dad’s copy of Ulysses, which he read and reread for over 70 years. The last two were from tapes, as his eyesight was failing. Between the third and fourth he notes that I read Ulysses in 1967 — quite a bit of it on a long camping trip in the Smokey Mountains."

see also his notes below in "Comments":

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Hungry Heart

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS
" . . . Such lowly ancestry
they have, these sprouts, so plain! They could be beads
or dresser knobs or marbles for a game . . . "
from the poem "Brussels Sprouts" by Catharine Savage Brosman
Thanks to the miracle of the internet and google search, I recently had the good fortune to encounter the work of contemporary poet Catharine Brosman and to "meet" her via e-mail. I had been experimenting with my camera, a pound of Brussels sprouts, and a few leeks, and was so pleased with my results (see "Still Life with Brussels Sprouts and Leeks," above) that I thought to myself, "There must be a poem out there somewhere to go with this picture." How delighted I was to discover Brosman's beautiful ode to the Brussels Sprout, just in time for St. David's Day (March First). Brosman herself observes that not many poems have been written on the topic of Brussels sprouts, and I know she is right, because I have searched! She (and LSU Press) graciously consented to my use of her unique vernal poem on my daily blog (see "My Vegetable Love," on the Quotidian Kit, March 1, 2011).

Brosman has written poetry on a variety of other vegetables, fruits and seafoods. The striking imagery of "Artichokes," "Mushrooms," "Lemons," and "Asparagus," was in my mind as I shopped for produce a few days after reading, her book Passages: Lemons "Seasoning the mind"; asparagus offering "all the images you wish"; mushrooms "decomposing in a bitter alchemy." My favorite has to be the secret interior of the artichoke: "A final leaf, and I have reached / the void of things, the emptiness within--but / no! for at the core . . . one finds . . . a hunger of the palate, / of the heart."

Everybody's Got a Hungry HeartPortobello Mushrooms in the Brattleboro Food Co-Op
Photo by Leif K-Brooks
The next two poems, "Portobello Mushroom" and "Truffles," capture beautifully this dual hunger of palate and heart. The narrator of "Portobello" longs for "purity," though not to the point of death. Life itself, as the mushroom exemplifies, can be "ugly," "rotten - looking," "disgusting," full of "nastiness and needs." In "Truffles," the hidden fungus is "almost a disease" yet "the taste of love is there." Brosman writes that "at an appearance at a Georgia university a few years ago, I read, as the last of my selections, the Portobello mushroom poem in front of a large crowd, mostly students; they were wild about it."

Here are the poems:

Portobello Mushrooms
They’re now in vogue, along with fava beans, veggie burgers,
feta cheese: all good for us, perhaps, but not uniquely so—
imported often and expensive, sought in grocery stores
and fancy restaurants by food snobs, vegetarians,
and others who have “principles.” Where’s the bello part
in portobello? Ugly and quite rotten-looking, they resemble
some strange, slimy creature living underground, or rather,
in the sea, a cousin to a sting-ray or a jellyfish, a slug

or barnacle. Good heavens, they’ve got gills! And I’m
supposed to have that in a pita sandwich, or, worse still,
in lieu of steak! Unless they’re finely chopped,
they cannot be disguised, and even then, that dark brown skin
looks awful, surely tough. Cèpes, champignons, morelles—
they too are fungi, like the portobello, but at least
they’re small and delicate and generally pale; yet I’m not sure
that they are not disgusting also. Do we really want to eat

a reproductive organ sprung tumescent from dead leaves
and compost? Gastronomic tolerance is quite amazing,
if you think of it: consider liver, tongue, brains,
tripe, and kidneys, not to mention mountain oysters. Writing
this, I fear I shall end up a vegan or a Jain, not on account
of “principles,” but after much reflection on such things.
I understand the man who starves himself, less from a saintly
impulse than through yearning for a kind of purity,

an unadulterated, out-of-body state, forswearing nastiness
and needs. But that is death. Serve up the mushrooms, then,
well diced and in a sauce, with garlic or another flavor, lest
they seem too close to nature: that my nature, too,
may be transcended, sublimated, borne beyond itself—
a feint (for even Adam and his rib-mate, newly fashioned, ate
of Eden’s fruits) yet an ideal—the being of the angels
without appetite, their wings transparent and their bodies light.

by Catharine Savage Brosman
© 2011.
"All Rights Reserved."

****************************
Truffles
Such a temperamental food—changeable, that is
deteriorating easily, and fitting thus a lovers’
dinner. Earthy too—in Paris, they are sold
still cradled in their soil, all damp and secretive,
suggestive of the body’s appetites—and seasonal,
like love, but more autumnal, being mold,

a fungus, almost a disease . . . Good heavens,
are they really a comestible? But those who know
them swear by the sensation: what aroma
in their pulp, what taste when they are perfect!
(the idea of pigs’ snouts, dogs’, and compost
notwithstanding). —There on my plate, it lay,

that tender truffle, once, with pâté de foie gras
and rounds of toast, intended to be savored
gracefully, enjoyed—a gastronomic jewel,
and more: epiphany, epitome of love. Bon appétit.
—Deep in his sea-blue eyes, the flavor
flashed and flamed. A bite, another bite, a kiss

across the table, more champagne. Thin coins,
they were, those moments of delight,
epiphenomena, mere flickers in a looking-glass,
or little tongues of fire on the river, silvered
by the setting sun, as twilight played
among appearances. The evening ended, wisps

of gustative remembrance on the wind,
and willow branches weaving in embrace. Now
I sometimes buy white truffles, tinned,
and serve them with a trout au beurre, my friends
exclaiming that the taste of love is there—
a luminance in flesh, the dark heart of the woods.

by Catharine Savage Brosman
© 2011.
"All Rights Reserved."

["Truffles" was published in Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture in 2003, and "Portobello Mushrooms" appeared in the same magazine in 2009. Brosman's upcoming collection, Under the Pergola will include the above "Portobello Mushrooms" and "Truffles," as well as a number of other food poems -- on Blueberries, Watermelon, Endive, Radishes, Figs, Grapefruit, and "Composition with Broccoli, # 2."]

The Yellow Morchella rotunda, a true Morel
photographed in France by Pascal Blachier
My personal introduction to the morel occurred one Spring, thirty - six years ago, just a month before my high school graduation, when my friend Yvonne invited me mushroom hunting. We rode the same school bus, but she lived just a little further out than I did, and in a more wooded area. I was never one for hiking or campfires; however, this particular excursion sounded not only pleasant but practically literary, like Wordsworth and his daffodils, or "gathering nuts in May." After all, it was May, and we hadn't much homework, and the sun lasted long into the evening. Yvonne said we should be able to find a lot; and she was right -- the morels were everywhere! However, I was startled abruptly out of my Wordsworthian reverie by Yvonne's observation that "obviously the brush hog had been through recently."

What? Should we turn around and run home? "No, it'll be okay." How could she remain so calm? She didn't seem the least bit bothered by this fearful news, so I tried to be a good guest and follow her lead, but visions of tusks and wild boars and razorbacks were racing through my head. I picked the rest of my mushrooms nervously and totally mystified by her lack of agitation.

As you might have already figured out, the last laugh was on me when I finally made it home and informed my parents of my brush with danger. It turns out that all the while that I was envisioning something like this:


Yvonne had something more like this in mind:


Well! How was I to know that
a Brush Hog (aka Bush Hog)










was not the same thing as
a Bush Pig?!













SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Saturday, May 14, 2011

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

and my previous Catharine Brosman post
on The Quotidian Kit:

"My Vegetable Love" March 1, 2011