These days, what seeker has ever
laid
eyes on a nutmeg grater? Something called
nutmeg leaps fully formed
from red-white-and-black Durkee boxes,
a harmless grist, innocently beige,
dry as the moon, sandy as kibble,
which mothers tap by scant
teaspoons into One-Pie pumpkin and scatter
thriftily onto box-milk Junket.
“Makes food look pretty!”
vows the label, but nutmeg
isn’t meant to be anything;
and if a child falls asleep on the
sofa
with the library’s black-leather
Dickens flung open on her chest
and dreams of Peggotty’s
red forefinger, rough as a nutmeg
grater, smelling of lye and ancient
floors, she dreams in similes
as vague as chivalry.
Then how is it that this child,
born to inherit our Age of Convenience,
feels so exactly the pine-cone
scrape of that phantom finger
against her sunburnt cheek?
Has callow Shelley turned out to be right
after all, blabbing his shrill
claptrap
at Godwin’s high-toned soirée—
“My opinion of love is that it
acts upon the human
heart precisely as a nutmeg
grater acts upon a nutmeg”—
and is the dog-eared, grade-school
social studies book just as true,
chanting its ode of immortality for
those
glory-hunters—da Gama,
Magellan—who bartered
their souls for cumin and cardamom,
vanilla and myrrh, for rattling
casks of seed more precious than prayer?
Because if the Land of Spices
is something understood,
a dream well dressed,
a paraphrase,
a kind of tune, brown and sweet,
round as earth,
ragged as our laboring flesh,
then even now, in the empire’s
rustiest outpost, in a kitchen
as dull as Saran Wrap, the slow palms sway
and the milky scent of paradise
lingers on the clean south wind:
our ordinary heaven,
this seven-day world,
transposing in an hour, as a child
snaps her sandals against a chair,
gobbles saltines and cherry Nehi,
and grates away at her own
hungry heart . . . word, after
word,
after sounding, star-bent word.
[first published in the Maine Poetry Review (fall 2005)]
***
As you can see from the credit line, this poem has been around for a long time, but somehow I could never find a place for it in a collection. The tone of the piece is eager and naive--a characteristic that I treasure--but this has also made it difficult to place within a group. The poem is like a cowlick that can't be combed down.
A couple of years ago, I thought of revising the piece to make it part of my western Pennsylvania history-poem project. So I tried out a few experiments: burnishing regional and 1950s-era details, re-imagining the "I" as a young woman of my mother's generation. Interestingly, however, none of these revisions had much effect on the original tone. The poem insists on being itself.
This fall, as I was grappling with the unwieldy organization of my Pennsylvania project, I found myself unexpectedly constructing Vocation, a poetry manuscript that combined a handful of those western Pennsylvania poems with a number of regionally unrelated poems about music, writing, practice, inspiration, and frustration. Suddenly, after a decade in limbo, "The Land of Spices" had found a context and a home. I never would have expected I'd be adding a ten-year-old poem to a new collection, but the development of this book has been a surprising lesson in patience.
9 comments:
Just the sprinkling of spice that was needed perhaps.
I really like this poem.
As an aside, I gave nutmeg graters to my friends for graduation. It seemed symbolic somehow.
Dawn I am curious to know about the journey this poem is taking. What happens between those Durkee boxes, the dreaming little girl and the empire's rustiest outpost? You call it eager and naive but to me it also feels resentful or angry that something as small and perfect as nutmeg is forgotten amid all our present Convenience. There is so much here that I am mostly lost, especially in the literary references but I think I understand why they are important; they represent the journey the seeker wishes folks could recall or not just recall but value. Anyway, it has been so long since I have written of, spoken of, or even read poetry that today, finding this, made me feel good. Thanks. -Nicholas-
I would be interested in hearing other readers' thoughts about Nicholas's question. As I wrote and revised the poem, I had the sense that the child had bypassed the Age of Convenience, had penetrated to those sources of imagination that are both more solid and more ephemeral than daily life. The literary references are, I think, less vital than the sense of a world beyond the present day and physical. But of course a poet always knows very little about the poems she writes. They take on their own lives and histories in the minds of other readers.
I'm not getting resentfulness not anger here. I read this as the connection of old soul to long ago.
I guess I meant a soft hearted sort of resentment/anger - sort of like wishful thinking. The connection to long ago is what, to me, the speaker values, and wishes others would value. While the form of the poem isn't necessarily race car fast or lend itself to anything I would call punchy, I can't help but feel that the speaker is sort of put off right from the opening line, "These days, what seeker has ever laid / eyes on a nutmeg grater? It makes me wonder "the good ole days." This piece certainly escapes being purely nostalgic and offers the reader something beautiful in the descriptions of the little girl; she is literally an age of wonder unto herself. She is as priceless as the nutmeg grater. The more I read this the more I like it but also, the more I want that little girl to speak, whether through words or action (snapping sandals is brilliant), and teach me that peace, those dreams I forgot I used to have. Damn it now I feel sad *laughing*.
Perhaps I feel like there is another poem here. One about the "Age of Convenience". I don't know, I guess I am just trying to exercise my poetry brain for the first time in a while and so thanks for this conversation.
As Nicholas knows, there are no wrong answers in this sort of conversation, only differences in how we apprehend a word like "seeker" in the context of a poem. Perceptions of glory can just as well suggest a mission of the Red Baron, Master of The Air, as the mindfulness of Baron Wormser, Master of "The Moves." Hence, wishful thinking or chasing a dream is not the same as the actual dream experience. The presence of "Peggotty" (one might substitute "Eternity") is what grounds every true Vocation, where one feels moved by Keat's call of the heart like Shelley's simile, smelling of freshly grated nutmeg, at the midpoint of this patient Potter poem, so gentle and caring in it's love for language, "word, after word, after sounding, star-bent word."
I love this conversation.
Dawn, I'm so glad you are finally happy with this poem, one of my favorites. I'm not sure, however, how I feel about the revision to "These days" from the original "In the 1970s." It seems to me that it confuses the distance between the speaker and the past self of the child--especially given your own comment about how you feel the child has moved past the A of C. In the earlier version (which I have my students read) the distance seems clearer. I wonder how Nicholas might respond to the earlier 1970s version?
I switched out the date as was reworking the poem into "western PA" status. But I think I agree with you, Tom. I'm going to put it back in.
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