Category Archives: poetry

I needed some green soup.

food and cooking, poetry,

Some tortures are physical
And some are mental,
But the one that is both
Is dental.

~Ogden Nash

Off and on since October I’ve been the frequent recipient of the benefits of modern dentistry, at which I am amazed and for which I am greatly thankful. Still, more than once while waiting “for things to settle down” I’ve had the proverbial aching tooth that is so distracting and mentally consuming. Just to prevent pain and promote recovery I was on two different occasions instructed to eat “nothing harder than spaghetti” for three days. That means no crunchy vegetables, which are one of my favorite munchies. It’s a good thing I have many soup recipes, and it’s also good that I had made a giant batch of this one before the torture began.

I made it with kale this time, and Mr. Glad thought that version was not half as good as the original spinach, but I could still slurp it by the quart. It’s the anise seed that makes it special. The recipe is pretty straightforward; I usually multiply it x8 so that I can have it in the freezer and at-the-ready. It loses nothing by waiting in the freezer and is a great accompaniment to any Italian main dish. I like it just as well without the cheese and lemon.

P1120284kale soup

FLORENTINE SPINACH SOUP

1 T. olive oil
½ c. each thinly sliced celery and green onion
2 tsp. anise seed
1 10-oz. pkg. frozen chopped spinach (other leafy greens may be substituted)
3 c. regular-strength chicken broth
¼ tsp. freshly ground pepper
lemon wedges
grated Parmesan cheese

Pour oil into a 3-4 qt. Pan over medium-high heat. When oil is hot, add celery, onion, and anise seed to pan; stir occasionally until vegetables just begin to brown, 8-10 minutes. Add spinach, broth, and pepper; bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer 10 minutes.

Pour soup, a portion at a time, into a blender or food processor (or use immersion blender?), and whirl until smoothly puréed. Reheat if necessary, pour into bowls, and offer lemon wedges and cheese to add to taste. Makes four servings (unless you are serving someone like me, who would want to eat this whole pot.)

It even comes to the boulder.

poetry

I have read this poem so many times, and still feel that I’m not equal to it, I can’t hope to plumb its depths. In that way the poem is like its subject, which speaks to me of the grace of God, something of Himself He gives us even though we are undeserving, unworthy, dense as rocks. It falls in the form of joy or peace or repentance, and when you’ve recovered from the surprise, you want to bake a cake and give a party.

HAPPINESS

There’s no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.

It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

~ Jane Kenyon

We kiss and name and praise.

poetry, the language, ,

I have a few hours to myself this afternoon and have been perusing a book of poetry that my husband gave me for Christmas, Dana Gioia’s Interrogations at Noon. I think I borrowed this collection from the library once, but long enough ago that even the poems I vaguely remembered are now fresh gifts — like this one on the first page.

WORDS

The world does not need words. It articulates itself
in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.
The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other –
illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.
Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands
glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow
arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper –
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,
painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving
each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.
The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always –
greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

— Dana Gioia

half dome 4 more sun yet
Webcam of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park

A poem like ammunition.

love, poetry, , , ,

millerw

 

The poet Miller Williams died on the first day of 2015. I had not been familiar with his poetry, though I knew of the book he co-authored, How Does a Poem Mean? As I browsed some of his works I came upon this one that I liked right away.

 

Love and How It Becomes Important in Our Day to Day Lives

The man who tells you which is the whiter wash,
the woman who talks about her paper towels,
the woman whose coffee holds her home together,
the man who smells the air in his neighbor’s house,

the man who sings a song about his socks,
the woman who tells how well her napkin fits,
the man who sells the four-way slicer-dicer,
the woman who crosses tape between her tits,

and scores besides trample my yard, a mob
demanding to be let in, like Sodomites
yelling to get at my guests but I have no guests.
I crawl across the floor and cut the lights.

“We know you’re in there,” they say. “Open the door.”
“Who are you?” I say. “What do you want with me?”
“What does it matter?” they say. “You’ll let us in.
Everyone lets us in. You’ll see. You’ll see.”

The chest against the door begins to give.
I settle against a wall. A window breaks.
I cradle a gun in the crook of my elbow.
I hear the porch collapse. The whole house shakes.

Then comes my wife as if to wake me up,
a case of ammunition in her arms.
She settles herself against the wall beside me.
“The towns are gone,” she says. “They’re taking the farms.”

–Miller Williams