la femme follette

voir dire

If the sun would shine, these babies could go outside already.  Three "Kermit" and three "Rosa Bianca" eggplant.  They are getting a little big for their pots. 

Also, in the category of "babies," there is still an awful lot going on here with mes enfants and the associated strain of it all.  In the midst of all of this strain-combatting interaction,  I can often try to end conversation or skirt conflict or let others save face by shrugging and spreading my palms in a non-threatening gesture and declaring myself a. a simple midwestern girl or b. just a housewife.  It infuriates me that no one falls for this.  In fact, the intended recipient generally scoffs aloud.  These are the people that are on our side.  I am always sad to realize I cannot maintain my low profile and more than that, that people will not just allow me the masquerade.       

love the exception

I am back into the regulation clingy, long-armed knits & low-rise jeans I wear three seasons and have dialed it down to Buffalo Springfield and solo Don Henley.  Don Henley from 25 years ago, not from the recent past where he styles like the male Faith Hill.  Kowalski called me tonight while I was out running errands and told me a funny, sweet story about someone we used to know, a story that is the tiniest bit sad.  I exchanged him, in the light of a sodium vapor lamp, a long confessional of the sort that is his purview.  He was noodling around on the piano while we talked and now I seem to have a thirst for Muddy Waters.  Or Outkast.  Leonard Cohen?  I cannot sort it all out just yet.  Obviously.

The rain continues and the eggplant are still inside, shivering.  If I had known that this spring would be this way, I would have planted spinach when I thought of it.  Sadly, I then considered the season too long in its tooth.  I have spinach from the farmer's market, however, still with its tiny roots attached.  It was being passed off as premium baby greens, but thinning the rows in the garden was my task as a child and I recognized the little roots attached to the babies as more of a waste not, want not situation.  Premium greens makes me laugh a little.

My (s)mother made this soup after Mass every Sunday when spinach was in the garden, which is in the Midwest a very, very long time.  It was always best with the thinned plants; I was happy to have 2 full bags.  It is the only soup I have ever known to be a fine companion to a plain green salad right alongside. 

Lentil Soup

Boil 2 cups French lentils in 10 cups of liquid as desired for soup* until quite tender.  Salt to taste, leave to cool. 

When ready to eat, give 4 to 6 large handfuls of clean, young spinach a quick turn in a 1/4c of butter on high heat, just long enough to wilt.  Pour spinach (with butter) into the lentils.  Puree to about a 70% smoothness, then reheat gently.  Taste again for salt, then add the juice of one lemon.  Serve hot.

I think it is Outkast, definitely.

*Chicken or vegetable stocks work well, although I always use water with 4 ribs of celery and 2 carrots, which I remove when the lentils are done.

some old bed

Early this week, I put Neil Young and the Allman Bros in a very heavy rotation around here, their entire discographies in an alternating fashion and yesterday I was one stick of Juicy Fruit and about 5 degrees from a halter-top.  Ready for summer!  The tomatoes are transplanted!  I might put my panties in yr pocket!  Then today it is about 60 degrees and pouring rain.  Pfft.

There is spinach in our CSA box, though.

This was good.  Like a vegan saag ... uh ... whatever it is.  The very pretty Santos knows.

Spinach with Chiles & Coconut Milk (again, from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.) 

Put 2 tsp peanut oil in a large saute pan over medium heat.  When hot, add 5 chiles; 5 whole, peeled cloves of garlic; a tsp of yr favorite curry powder.  Give it 30 seconds before throwing in a pound of whole spinach and a cup (or so) of coconut milk.   

Turn the heat way down and leave it, uncovered, for 30-ish minutes, with an occasional stir.  When it is done (in the photo it is not; creamed spinach is pretty non-photogenic), the liquid will have mostly evaporated and the spinach will be quite soft.  Salt to taste, throw in a bit of butter if that is yr thing.   

cherchez la femme

There are no photographs of the shame & horticultural neglect, but a three-foot-wide, 10-foot-tall section of my Mme Alfred Carrière just fell right from its corset to flop horizontally into the garden.  For months I really could not make time to give a fuck about it (also, thorny!  ow!) and all along the way, it was as if she had been trained horizontally, so she is covered in blooms this year, but only along that section.  Something about the word axial.

I love the flower, have written about it before, the three stages of old Mme Carrière -- the tight pink bud, all flushed at the bursting seam; the ruffly crinoline, chocolate-box-tidy layers of the bloom; the flower at its end, every petal open in every direction, not a trace of pink in sight, just an excellent, slutty, I-don't-give-a-damn mess.  Alfred Carrière must have had excellent taste in a certain kind of foxy firebrand, of that I am sure.

I never cut the flower to bring it inside, however, because the cut flower is so top-heavy on its teensy petite stems and my frogs are none the right size.  I am too distracted to find out from where to get floral foam.  Also, without a bloom, the plant is just this big brambly green monster trying to scale our house.  But this year, I have extras.  So, I just cut a big pile of them and kept cutting away at each one until they could be propped in a café au lait bowl.  I am so glad for my success, too, because it all smells incredible.          

sprung

Stir-fried asparagus would have seemed to me like an awful waste before last night.  Last night, after eating asparagus five of the last seven nights then looking into the fridge to discover there were still three more hefty bunches of stalks rubberbanded together in the crisper drawer, I became deeply exhausted and in need of preparation more dynamic than roast/steam/grill w olive oil and salt.  It was so delicious, we have forgotten we were ever about to tire of asparagus and now only want to know when we can have more and for how long (Thursday, and about another week, respectively).

Stir-Fried Asparagus (from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian)

Cut 1.5-2lbs trimmed asparagus into 2-inch lengths.  Heat a wok over high heat for 3-4 minutes.  Add 2tbsp peanut oil, wait a few secs, then add the asparagus (at this moment, as per his variations list, I added a couple of thinly-sliced shallots).  Toss, then stir in 1tbsp minced garlic (and 2 dried chiles if you wish).  Continue to cook, tossing, until the asparagus is dry, hot, and beginning to brown.

Add 2tbsp water and the soy sauce and continue to cook until the asparagus is tender, another 3-5 minutes.  (I also added, again as per the variations list, a handful of slivered & blanched almonds)Drizzle with a small amount (1tsp) of sesame oil, salt if you wish, and serve. 

queen amygdala

I bought something like a bushel basket of lilacs last week.  Lilacs are on my radar, people talk about them, Martha Stewart has opinions of them and whole issues of her magazine devoted to their cultivars, and I just bob along, Oh, my grandmother's house had an enormous lilac shrub in the yard.  Kind of seasonal for me to grow, but nice.  Purply! 

I was alone at the market last week and stuck my face inside a bouquet of them and the smell unfortunately & immediately transported me to a vale of memories exactly like a minefield.  For the last decade, the only people related to me by blood that I see are the people who grew inside of me and god, I have lost so much.  I am trying to work through it all, so I filled the house with lilacs.  I do not know how it will work out.  Maybe I will just go insane.

My son has been up to his usual hijinks -- plumbing, plaster, floods.  The kind of careless and clueless destruction that means I can only go on through our days by treating him like the stoner roommate with the psychotic girlfriend who has also stiffed me on the gas bill for the last three months.  I will help you out in a jam, man, but day to day?  We are not pals.  I know this dynamic well, having watched it play out over years as a girl in the tiny and neighboring-to-mine home of a taciturn molecular biologist who loved the smell of Guerlain's Shalimar and ran six miles every day, no matter the windchill.  It occurs to me that I do not know how that all ended -- the roommate relationship seeded in kindergarten, the deranged girlfriend, the habituation, the sense-memory most readily accessed upon exposure to fin de siècle perfume -- but I do know that Facebook is not our vehicle for answers.  Or could it be?

achieve, vanish

A lot of the poems I love the best are difficult for me to show in this space because of line lengths or spacings and indentations, or just the length of the piece.  Or because of the prosody pedigree, because of a. rhyming and b. the Billy Collins thing.  I just cannot get started on a & b there, but I will say that a lot of this work reminds me of so-called "modern art," in that people who should get it are really very threatened by and hostile toward it, and then people who don't get it at all say dopey & ridiculous things like "I could do that."  To which of course, the answer is, ""But you didn't."  Or if one is generous, "So, go ahead!"  It is the difference between Robert Frost and Robert Fitterman.

I mean, I like plenty of vanilla poetry, but I like Monet, too.  OK, actually, I hate Monet.  But I like, um ... I like Renoir!  And Cezanne!  Seurat!  Not everyone can be a Fontana or an Arbus or a Van Gogh.  The difference between Vermeer and Van Gogh is the difference between like and love. 

So, for example, there is "Metropolis 16" from Fitterman that I was explaining to Mari a couple of days ago, which is so, like ... whoa.  Also, Kenneth Goldsmith's Soliloquy, which is fabulously say what?  Paul Violi's "Index," over which he gives an interesting chat on his process for that.  Christian Bok and his endlessly euphonious Eunoia is a piece that I adore (there is a lot of making clicky on those pages).  Katie Degentesh has a whole chapbook sitting right here on my desk and I cannot pick just one.  Also, Merry Fortune. 

Then there is the poet whose work I do not like at all.  She reads this poem on an audio collection we own of poetry read by the poets.  I would be driving the car, listening to her tracks without realizing it and then with it stuck in my head endlessly make fun of it, endlessly.  Whenever the children were being naughty, I would declaim in a fake & dramatic accent the first line, and tiny 4-year-old Fillette would finish the stanza.  Years of therapy for my daughter, I guess, which it seems this gal really needed.

Daddy
Sylvia Plath

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

Here is a more nuanced discussion of this poem, in case there should be more in the world for it than ugh.

je vous laisse mourir

Soneto XLV
Pablo Neruda

No estés lejos de mí un solo día, porque cómo,
porque, no sé decirlo, es largo el día,
y te estaré esperando como en las estaciones
cuando en alguna parte se durmieron los trenes.

No te vayas por una hora porque entonces
en esa hora se juntan las gotas del desvelo
y tal vez todo el humo que anda buscando casa
venga a matar aún mi corazón perdido.

Ay que no se quebrante tu silueta en la arena,
ay que no vuelen tus párpados en la ausencia:
no te vayas por un minuto, bienamada,

porque en ese minuto te habrás ido tan lejos
que yo cruzaré toda la tierra preguntando
si volverás o si me dejarás muriendo.

(The intarweb is lousy with a terrible translation of this poem.  It is infuriating; Neruda is widely regarded as one of the most important poets of the 20thc and all of the people translating his work are so bad at it.)

mme bovary and the refuah sh'lemah

A few years ago, I started to slip quietly from our house with no small amount of guilt, leaving my babies behind to go around and write poems and talk to people and listen to them also about poetry and poetics.  If not for the fact that I had been writing something nearly every day since the very day I learned to write as a child, it would have been so embarrassingly pedestrian & cliche.  In fact, I did feel like a silly, post-natal, finding-myself cliche right up until the time that it became obvious (in a flood of my ambivalence) that people really liked my work. 

This, of course, was such an excellently internal Sally Field pop-culture reference with which to amuse myself that I was perfectly healed.  Also with sneaking out before dawn to walk briskly around for miles with our 120-pound dog.  At least I thought I was perfectly healed.  Then I was sitting around, workshopping poems with people under the auspices of the Poetry Project, and the aforementioned Rob Fitterman was going through my poem line-by-line with some glee and then in conclusion said, "And then!  To show off the top of your range!"  I did not hear the rest, sitting there as I was thinking, "I have a range?  Really?"  Then, I thought I was perfectly healed.

I was really productive and engaged between 2004 and 2006 -- a lot of writing; attending a lot of readings; a lot of travel; 7/8 of a manuscript, portions of which were always well-received.  Then the children started to push back a little and I decided that this was all silly, a pedestrian cliche.  I have children.  Only about 627 people in America even read poetry.  Half of that number thinks it should rhyme.  Then there is the whole Billy Collins issue. 

I put all of my work away, far away, up on a high shelf and decided that I would just wait and see, of course, because the next step on the path I am on is residencies and I cannot make time to go away for 2 or 4 weeks to write (how silly!  I am a mother!) until the children are somewhat older.  I took it down and spread it out a couple of months ago and (again to my chagrin) saw a lot of it is really good work.  This tiny piece shows off the top of my range.  Like Mariah Carey, but not so noisy.  I am still waiting on my perfect healing (also like Mariah Carey, but not so noisy).

      

Symbiotic Liberation
Lala Follette

Daffodils languish. The telegram came today in secret.

Patti Hearst will blossom into something like a virgin (stop)
The dehumanization, submission, and serial foolish events were
underestimated (stop)
The loneliness, the rage, the energizing uncertainty are
now awarded a measure of monastic silence, aspirin dissolved
in a persian libation no one knows.
(punto final)

I don't know.

I thought at first this wasn't love. But, cicadas are
pregnant, lamenting morphine, pornography and Larry Hagman. The
name of a dromedary on the shirtwaist of a cigar loads a shimmering
desire into the porous heart of a hippo. Freedom is fingers inside this
hourglass, the bra of a prostitute pollinated with cream mined from a
buttercup's regret.

Instead of gossip, the glotted silence of Frenchmen, carnivorous and
blowing woodsmoke, dissolves into a line, a song, it reeks of the dew
on lilacs -- distinctly minty and without deceit.

Dredged from the valley of a tribe of bubbles -- those devalued spheres
of aerosol, glistening like Lily Langtry in a brothel with an anaconda --
our swan is resuscitated, fleeing, flying. The meadow is open,
the closet is a dance floor, we sail languid and ablaze, swallowing
the whole winter of the sun.

still nat'l poetry month

I have run in the same poetry circles with this woman, another found-text-smithing poet whose work is always remarked upon for presenting as funny before revealing itself as sad.  This has the effect of leaving a reading audience stricken, but in a good way.  I think I have heard her say she is a midwesterner, too.  (All these midwesterners!  Running loose over Manhattan & writing poems!)  I was thinking of this one because today is my wedding anniversary.

Why Marriage Works
Michelle Scheidel

Antique lace, demure details, golden eggs, the
cocktail. A virgin, the quince, sobriety, writing
checks blindly, a rock-hard stomach. The third
unwanted child, youth and plain arrogance, what

caused the swelling. A dozen armed physicians,
a complimentary round of ammo, hubris, the
progress of the natural gas pipe. A willingness
to be wounded, an espresso machine, acres and

acres of pecans. Longtime interest, a return for
an equity stake, fear that lingers in tunnels. The
learning of patience, searching for something,
hard-boiled assessments, sagging but stately.

Blood sugar, blood pressure, a future testimony,
hazarded guesses, a certain hue of the sky, putting
on armor, environmental abuse. Passion, fire-
places, impulsivity, despair, rent-regulated apart-

ments. Dead silence, watercolor florals, compulsion,
anesthesia. Memories, insurance settlements, home-
lessness, a heat wave. Heavy doses of fatalism, old-
time romance, nervous breakdowns, the alternatives.