The Ongoing Poem Series About Autumn 2005

September 2, 2005
Cooked up a whole bunch of produce last night that was in danger of expiring

I made a marinara sauce
with the rest of the tomatoes
and put it in the freezer
made Bill’s grandmother’s baptist church fresh cucumber pickles to put in the fridge
The notion that I might taste
tomatoes or blueberries
next January
thrills me
The pickles were easy to make
They sit in their square-sided glass jar
pale-green and almost glowing
Strange as it seems I don’t think I’ve ever
made tomato sauce before
It cooked
covered
for an hour and a half in the red dutch oven
filling the house with the scent of tomatoes, onions, garlic, basil, oregano
It needed stirring up every fifteen minutes
Each time I took the lid off
I understood better what they mean when they talk about a sauce being
velvety
a visible texture
a sort of shimmering softness all along the top

I also made Bill’s bag lunch salami sandwich
spreading the mayonnaise with the wide-bladed knife all the way out to the edges of the bread
It’s hard to make his sandwich and not think about his sadness
How little short lines have appeared around his mouth
where usually no lines are
the distorted inverse of his dimples
His nearness to tears on such an unrelentingly regular basis
And the feeling there’s nothing I can do
None of which is particularly germane to tomato sauce or the pleasures of mayonnaise
But more and more
I see I need
now
somehow
to be solid myself if I’m going to help at all
And it turns out
that one way to court solidity
is to get the housework done
and write it down

image source is here