I’ll Stop the Verse and Melt With You
Nov 11th, 2009 by Marilyn
As noted here, I have a thing for butter and sadly, we’re not talking toast. I tell you, sometimes I pop butter directly with brown sugar and my mouth thinks why bother baking? It’s all here.
Back in bakery years, working all day near 64-pound butter blocks was torture, a special brand of wafting, yellow, room-temp torture. Good thing we had spreaders and baguettes, which lavishly eased the pain. Outside pesky cholesterol, there’s only one butter problem I see: it does not like you taking its picture. Yes – I know most people don’t casually pose the butter, but I’ve had reason to more than once, and every time a wash. Butter swirls through the kitchen and dominates the tongue, but snap a photo and it goes pale, improbably dull. Does it think we’ll steal its soul? How can a robust bar of fat be such a wallflower in the lens?
My most successful butter shot was a fluke. Messing around one day with the cheese planer, it landed on a chunk of Plugra, and this is what I got. Perhaps that’s a butter-photography secret: just ask it to stand up straight.
Last week for my birthday, dear pal Lora Kolodny, whip-smart business reporter (and New York Times blogger) sent me wishes along with a poem, a work I’d never seen and one she clearly knew I’d love, a poem called Butter. I was delighted; I’ve always loved poetry, for the way it kisses language, for the chance it gives the heart, and for its ability to illustrate the familiar in a different shaft of light. Here on the page, with no props or toast, wonderful poet Connie Wanek brings the spread into view. With Ms. Wanek’s kind permission, we can finally look at butter in the proper light.
Butter
by Connie Wanek, 2000
Butter, like love,
seems common enough
yet has so many imitators.
I held a brick of it, heavy and cool,
and glimpsed what seemed like skin
beneath a corner of its wrap;
the decolletage revealed
a most attractive fat!
And most refined.
Not milk, not cream,
not even creme de la creme.
It was a delicacy which assured me
that bliss follows agitation,
that even pasture daisies
through the alchemy of four stomachs
may grace a king’s table.
We have a yellow bowl near the toaster
where summer’s butter grows
soft and sentimental.
We love it better for its weeping,
its nostalgia for buckets and churns
and deep stone wells,
for the press of a wooden butter mold
shaped like a swollen heart.
Connie Wanek has been writing poems since childhood. She is the author of two books, with a third forthcoming, and she has been the recipient of several awards, including the Willow Poetry Prize and the Jane Kenyon Poetry Prize. Most recently, she was named a Witter Bynner Fellow of the Library of Congress by United States Poet Laureate Ted Kooser. She lives in the country outside Duluth, Minnesota, but often finds herself in a green tent somewhere in the Boundary Waters wilderness.
I’ve been flirting with Plugra in the grocery store. I pick it up. Consider it. Put it back down. Buy the cheaper one. This has been going on for years. I even had Plugra coupons awhile back.
The butter shot is gorgeous beyond description. I think it’s the Plugra though….royalty does wonders for being photogenic.
Lovely! As always.
Mmmmmmm. Butter!
So enjoy your writing. Its real! Of course now I am inspired to spring for a more coveted, refined “brick” of “butta.” Perhaps the Plugra, or some freshly born European facsimile. After all, its the time to indulge and offer comfort this season.
AmyRuth
I am with Jean. I pick up the Plugra, caress the metallic package, place it back gingerly and pick up the store brand. (I know…I am missing out on the X-tra fat and flavor)
—-The husband would prob. melt the designer butter in the microwave and place on his popcorn, anyway.
If anyone could coax butter to pose, it would be you. Love the curled butter shot. And thanks for sharing the poem.
Love, love that you introduced me to a new poet via my favourite food. As to the Plugra, Jean… put it down, walk into Trader Joe’s and pick up the President! (pronounced Prezzie – don)
First and foremost, Happy belated Birthday!!! Funny thing happened on the way to Wegman’s last trip up to PA. I picked up the Plugra and actually added it to the cart. I mean really, my grand daughter will be celebrating her seventh birthday with us this year and her request for a Strawberry Shortcake a la pound cake just needed to have the creamy best. Wish me luck though, as you know Marilyn; I’m no baker!!! Love the “curl” and the poem. Thanks for sharing…
Phenomenal photo Marilyn! Who says butter can’t be photogenic?
Happy belated birthday – I hope it was butter and fun-filled. What kind of cake did you have?
Just so we’re clear, I don’t always use Plugra – but I do sometimes, and its flat-brick shape made that butter loop possible. Also, it’s good.
Jane (modernemama) is correct about the Prezzie-don brand, and I’m also partial to Danish Lurpak and, god help me, this dairy gold from the UK:
http://www.somerdale.co.uk/products/butter.htm
Anyone else have a food-related poem to share? Post away.
RE: food-related poems. I love “August” by Mary Oliver:
When the blackberries hang
swollen in the woods, in the brambles
nobody owns, I spend
all day among the high
branches, reaching
my ripped arms, thinking
of nothing, cramming
the black honey of summer
into my mouth; all day my body
accepts what it is. In the dark
creeks that run by there is
this thick paw of my life darting among
the black bells, the leaves; there is
this happy tongue.
This is Just to Say
by William Carlos Williams
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
Wonderful poem about butter! Here’s one I wrote about stuffed grape leaves – silly at best:
I often wonder of the vine,
That grows the grapes that make the wine.
Around the world we share this juice,
It tastes so good. It makes us loose.
Of this drink I do partake,
But wake up with a great headache.
To shun this vitis all together,
Would make me sad, under the weather.
So I don’t remain dejected,
To this stem I stay connected.
Outside I go, roll up my sleeves,
Get right down and pick the leaves.
Not for display or pretty bouquet,
These go on my dinner tray.
I would not mind to eat alone,
But before you judge or throw a stone,
Try one stuffed with meat and rice,
You might think it tastes quite nice.
Soaked in a bath of lemony stock,
A little tart but it won’t shock.
There really is no good excuse
Grab one, dip it in hummus.
No longer will you be polite,
For them you will gladly fight.
And you will find out just like I,
Both fruit and leaf can make you high.
Thank you, love those!
I memorized this little Robert Louis Stevenson bit as a kid and it still repeats in my head today. I guess I’ll be sticking with it.
The Cow
The friendly cow all red and white,
I love her with all my heart:
She gives me cream with all her might,
To eat with apple-tart.
She wanders lowing here and there,
And yet she cannot stray,
All in the pleasant open air,
The pleasant light of day;
And blown by all the winds that pass
And wet with all the showers,
She walks among the meadow grass
And eats the meadow flowers.
Wendell Berry. from A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997
1996: VII
In spring we planted seed,
And by degrees the plants
Grew, flowered, and transformed
The light to food, which we
Brought in, and ate, and lived.
The year grown old, we gathered
All that remained. We broke,
Manured, prepared the ground
For overwintering,
And thus at last made clear
Our little plot of time,
Tropical for a while,
Then temperate, then cold.
I love the butter pic! You can see the fine ribs where the plane cut into it. And I love, even more, that you’re keeping poetry in the blog limelight. Happily enough, I’m reading you from the City Bakery’s Birdbath Neighborhood bakery which reeks of buttery goodness thanks especially to their famous pretzel croissants. When you’re in NYC let’s meet up for a hot chocolate, & one of these bad boys.
This food-related poem has always been my favorite….I don’t know who the author is:
Kiss me with mangoes, still on your lips
embrace me with dewberries clinging
woo me when winds of morning are birds softly singing
Hold me while summer cherries
are red as the reddest wine
and sun-ripe scuppernongs turn bronze upon a swaying vine
Caress me where wild strawberries crush
beneath our dancing feet
and where pomegranates hang like love, intricately sweet
An FYI- a scuppernong is a grape native the the SE United States, and dewberries are closely related to blackberries.
More about longing than food, perhaps, here is a little from one of a favorite poem, A Supermarket in California by Allen Ginsberg.
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for
I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families
shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes!–and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery
boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
Butter is, simply put, one of the four food groups. I eat it daily (and I am not talking toast here, either). I Just Can’t Get Enough (I know, Depeche Mode, when you had set the soundtrack to Modern English).
“Werther had a love for Charlotte, Such as words could never utter; Would you know how first he met her? She was cutting bread and butter.” ~ William Thackeray
“Eat butter first, and eat it last, and live till a hundred years be past.” ~ Old Dutch proverb
I often think about being a dairy farmer. You can’t go wrong with butter, cheese, or milk, but those blessings are hard earned by a farmer. I heard the following poem on The Splendid Table a few months ago.
Apple Slices by Todd Boss
—eaten right
off the jackknife in
moons, half moons,
quarter moons and
crescents—
still
summon common
summer afternoons
I spent as my dad’s
jobsite grunt, framing
future neighbors’
houses out of 2x4s
and 4x6s,
and our
brief and silent pick-
up tailgate lunch-
box lunch breaks
of link sausage,
longhorn cheddar,
larder pickles, cold
leftover roast-beef-
and-butter sandwiches
wrapped in paper,
a couple of pippins
from the Fall Crick
Pick-n-Save, and—
flavored of tin from
the lip of the cup
of a dented thermos
passed between us—
a hard-earned share
of still-chill well
water…
Now
so many waned and
waxed moons later,
another well-paid,
well-fed, college-
bred paper-pusher, I
wonder that I’ve never
labored harder, nor
eaten better.
this one lives on my refrigerator:
irreverent baking
I should be upstairs with the others, drumming up ways
to heal the world, save the animals, pray for water
in a far-off continent, devote the remainder of my days
to a catalog of restorations. But this morning, it was the matter
of scones that drew my gaze, and my feet remained
planted in the kitchen. One must never ignore the instinct
to create, is what I told myself, and soon the counter was stained
with flour, my hands sticky with dough, the house inked
with the smell of blueberry possibility, and I knew I was not wrong.
This was my prayer, my act of healing, my offering, my song.
-maya stein (http://papayamaya.blogspot.com)
I didn’t know it was Beat (not beet, ironically) day at Marilyn’s! ::snapping::
I don’t think I have a poem for open mic night, but I have to say I’m enjoying everyone else’s. However, I will do my best and offer up a haiku:
Butter, so creamy
Why must you stick to my hips?
I need to diet
butta…nothing like butta….
Wow…who knew I loved poetry so much? Or maybe it’s the subject at hand
Either way, I’m liking it!
I love the poem! Thanks for sharing! And happy belated Birthday!