Another Poem of the Gifts

I want to give thanks to the divine
Labyrinth of causes and effects
For the diversity of beings
That form this singular universe,
For Reason, that will never give up its dream
Of a map of the labyrinth,
For Helen's face and the perseverance of Ulysses,
For love, which lets us see others
As God sees them,
For the solid diamond and the flowing water,
For Algebra, a palace of exact crystals,
For the mystic coins of Angelus Silesius,
For Schopenhauer,
Who perhaps deciphered the universe,
For the blazing of fire,
That no man can look at without an ancient wonder,
For mahogany, cedar, and sandalwood,
For bread and salt,
For the mystery of the rose
That spends all its colour and can not see it,
For certain eves and days of 1955,
For the hard riders who, on the plains,
Drive on the cattle and the dawn,
For mornings in Montevideo,
For the art of friendship,
For Socrates' last day,
For the words spoken one twilight
From one cross to another,
For that dream of Islam that embraced
A thousand nights and a night,
For that other dream of Hell,
Of the tower of cleansing fire
And of the celestial spheres,
For Swedenborg,
Who talked with the angels in London streets,
For the secret and immemorial rivers
That converge in me,
For the language that, centuries ago, I spoke in Northumberland,
For the sword and harp of the Saxons,
For the sea, which is a shining desert
And a secret code for things we do not know
And an epitaph for the Norsemen,
For the word music of England,
For the word music of Germany,
For gold, that shines in verses,
For epic winter,
For the title of a book I have not read: Gesta Dei per Francos,
For Verlaine, innocent as the birds,
For crystal prisms and bronze weights,
For the tiger's stripes,
For the high towers of San Francisco and Manhattan Island,
For mornings in Texas,
For that Sevillian who composed the Moral Epistle
And whose name, as he would have wished, we do not know,
For Seneca and Lucan, both of Cordova,
Who, before there was Spanish, had written
All Spanish literature,
For gallant, noble, geometric chess,
For Zeno's tortoise and Royce's map,
For the medicinal smell of eucalyptus trees,
For speech, which can be taken for wisdom,
For forgetfulness, which annuls or modifies the past,
For habits,
Which repeat us and confirm us in our image like a mirror,
For morning, that gives us the illusion of a new beginning,
For night, its darkness and its astronomy,
For the bravery and happiness of others,
For my country, sensed in jasmine flowers
Or in an old sword,
For Whitman and Francis of Assisi, who already wrote this poem,
For the fact that the poem is inexhaustible
And becomes one with the sum of all created things
And will never reach its last verse
And varies according to its writers
For Frances Haslam, who begged her children's pardon
For dying so slowly,
For the minutes that precede sleep,
For sleep and death,
Those two hidden treasures,
For the intimate gifts I do not mention,
For music, that mysterious form of time.

-Jorge Luis Borges, 1963

Happy Thanksgiving.
(video/music recommendation from Katerina.)

When the Frost is on the Punkin

When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock,
And you hear the kyouck and gobble of the struttin’ turkey-cock,
And the clackin’ of the guineys, and the cluckin’ of the hens,
And the rooster’s hallylooyer as he tiptoes on the fence;
O, it’s then’s the times a feller is a-feelin’ at his best,
With the risin’ sun to greet him from a night of peaceful rest,
As he leaves the house, bareheaded, and goes out to feed the stock,
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock.

They’s something kindo’ harty-like about the atmusfere
When the heat of summer’s over and the coolin’ fall is here—
Of course we miss the flowers, and the blossums on the trees,
And the mumble of the hummin’-birds and buzzin’ of the bees;
But the air’s so appetizin’; and the landscape through the haze
Of a crisp and sunny morning of the airly autumn days
Is a pictur’ that no painter has the colorin’ to mock—
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock.

The husky, rusty russel of the tossels of the corn,
And the raspin’ of the tangled leaves, as golden as the morn;
The stubble in the furries—kindo’ lonesome-like, but still
A-preachin’ sermuns to us of the barns they growed to fill;
The strawstack in the medder, and the reaper in the shed;
The hosses in theyr stalls below—the clover over-head!—
O, it sets my hart a-clickin’ like the tickin’ of a clock,
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock!

Then your apples all is gethered, and the ones a feller keeps
Is poured around the celler-floor in red and yeller heaps;
And your cider-makin’ ’s over, and your wimmern-folks is through
With their mince and apple-butter, and theyr souse and saussage, too! ...
I don’t know how to tell it—but ef sich a thing could be
As the Angels wantin’ boardin’, and they’d call around on me—
I’d want to ’commodate ’em—all the whole-indurin’ flock—
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock!

-James Whitcomb Riley, 1916

As If

 

How do you explain why elephants

appear to move their unwieldy hulks

with greater dignity than most humans do

in their finest moments,

as if they had evolved beyond wanting

anything but what they have?

Why does the field begin to ripple

before the wind arrives in whispers,

as if there were a communication,

as if the landscape were poorly dubbed,

and we weren’t expected to notice?

What butterfly does not dart away from us

as if it could sense our latent cruelties,

and yet return to check and double-check?

Has the night not gotten recently darker,

as if to insinuate that we have squandered

the light that was there?

Have we made too much of our own?

And did you notice afterward the dawn

opening up with a tentative eagerness

as if there were something crucial to illumine,

as if we would wake up early just to see it?

I imagine you reading this now

with an expression of quiet trouble

itself troubled by currents of hope,

as if you imagined me here with you,

as if I might be able to see your expression,

and at least answer it with mine.

 

-J. Allyn Rosser, 2011

I may as well fess up: I have a twitter. I have had one for well over a year, I've just never quite worked out what to use it for (other than bugging the brother). But the thing is still there, lurking, and I figured--why not make a proper go of it? I still don't know what I'll tweet about. I'll try to make less of them @jackamick, though. If I really get into the swing of things, maybe I'll even add the twit-thing to the sidebar. But for now:

@amickari

(postscript: if you're on twitter, any recommendations about people to follow?)

In my memories, the summer of 2008--the first summer I was living and cooking on my own, away from home and without the college safeguard of a dining hall--is marked by my mother repeatedly asking what I was eating. It was a question that came out of some mixture of concern and curiosity: I had declared myself a vegetarian somewhere in there, and although I ostensibly knew how to cook the real question was whether I could cook for myself, day in and day out. Did I have the wherewithal? Grocery shopping only once every two weeks, would I be able to gauge what I needed, and how much? Or would I end up anemic, or otherwise malnourished?

The good news: I made it through that summer, and more after, with little to no significant changes in health. But the question still manifests itself occasionally, though: what are you eating? What am I eating?

Soup, mostly. And other things, but I like food that I can toss in one big pot and store in one big tupperware, so if it's not soup it's something that's true to the spirit: a pot of black beans jumbled with sauteed vegetables and maybe some cheddar cheese, served on top of rice, or shepherd's pie with lentils replacing the ground beef. Right now, though, at this precise moment: I'm eating pho.

I'm mentioning this because making my own pho is something that's new to me, and it's been an inroad into making my own vegetable stock, which I'd never done before. That in and of itself is kind of strange, because most of my soups use water in place of stock, and so I'm effectively making a stock over the course of making a soup. But these broths are, for lack of a better word, thin--the broth doesn't carry the soup.

Pho is traditionally a beef noodle soup, and the first time I tried to make a vegetarian version the lack was pretty apparent: it was just noodles and broth, and while the broth was good it wasn't good enough--it needed a lot of salt, and I ate giant bowls of it because it wasn't particularly filling. It's probably my own fault for not liking tofu particularly, but here we are, second time around.

I used this recipe as a base and expounded from there. Start with a pot of decent size: add onion (1, quartered with skin), shallots (2, halved with skin), garlic (8 cloves, halved), ginger (~1 inch piece, sliced), star anise (2 pods), cinnamon (2 sticks) and carrots (chopped). Dry roast until vegetables begin to char, and then add white mushrooms (~10, coarsely chopped), and celery (2 stalks, coarsely chopped). I used some rice wine vinegar here to help get the brown bits off the bottom, and then add water (10 cups) and soy sauce (3 tablespoons).

Bring that to a boil, then reduce it to a simmer and cook for an hour at least. I tasted the broth along the way until I thought the flavor was strong enough--there may have been a compromise here because I was hungry, but when it was done it had a nice rich color and was fairly flavorful. Then I removed the aromatics, onions, etc. but left some of the mushrooms and carrots in and added vermicelli rice noodles (200g--though you could use less, mine basically took over the pot, which rice noodles tend to do), and some fish sauce. This where it starts to veer a little from traditional pho (if you didn't guess it would when I left some vegetables in the broth): I also added an entire head of chopped bok choy, the juice of one lime, and cilantro and basil (a loose half a cup of each). The last three are normally added to the bowl at the table; this way I can store all my pho in the fridge and reheat without worrying about lime wedges and herb garnishes (though I did add the srichacha by the bowl, because I always go overboard with that stuff at least once).

There you go, then: what I'm eating.

First Snow, Kerhonkson

--(for Alan) 
 

This, then, is the gift the world has given me

(you have given me)

softly the snow

cupped in hollows

lying on the surface of the pond

matching my long white candles

which stand at the window

which will burn at dusk while the snow

fills up our valley

this hollow

no friend will wander down

no one arriving brown from Mexico

from the sunfields of California, bearing pot

they are scattered now, dead or silent

or blasted to madness

by the howling brightness of our once common vision

and this gift of yours—

white silence filling the contours of my life.

-Diane di Prima, 1990

Haymaking

After night’s thunder far away had rolled
The fiery day had a kernel sweet of cold,
And in the perfect blue the clouds uncurled,
Like the first gods before they made the world
And misery, swimming the stormless sea
In beauty and in divine gaiety.
The smooth white empty road was lightly strewn
With leaves—the holly’s Autumn falls in June—
And fir cones standing stiff up in the heat.
The mill-foot water tumbled white and lit
With tossing crystals, happier than any crowd
Of children pouring out of school aloud.
And in the little thickets where a sleeper
For ever might lie lost, the nettle-creeper
And garden warbler sang unceasingly;
While over them shrill shrieked in his fierce glee
The swift with wings and tail as sharp and narrow
As if the bow had flown off with the arrow.
Only the scent of woodbine and hay new-mown
Travelled the road. In the field sloping down,
Park-like, to where its willows showed the brook,
Haymakers rested. The tosser lay forsook
Out in the sun; and the long waggon stood
Without its team, it seemed it never would
Move from the shadow of that single yew.
The team, as still, until their task was due,
Beside the labourers enjoyed the shade
That three squat oaks mid-field together made
Upon a circle of grass and weed uncut,
And on the hollow, once a chalk-pit, but
Now brimmed with nut and elder-flower so clean.
The men leaned on their rakes, about to begin,
But still. And all were silent. All was old,
This morning time, with a great age untold,
Older than Clare and Cobbett, Morland and Crome,
Than, at the field’s far edge, the farmer’s home,
A white house crouched at the foot of a great tree.
Under the heavens that know not what years be
The men, the beasts, the trees, the implements
Uttered even what they will in times far hence—
All of us gone out of the reach of change—
Immortal in a picture of an old grange.

-Edward Thomas, 1917