Vox Populi
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Diane Wakoski: Braised Leeks & Framboise
for Annette Smith
The ocean
this morning
has tossed someone’s garbage
over its surface,
half oranges
that make my mouth pucker for
fresh juice,
lettuce leaves
looking fragile, decorative, like scarves
for the white curling locks
of old water.
It is not hard
to think of women
coming up out of the dense green,
fully formed but not
of flesh, of some tissue, floating
goddess-like
and pale.
For breakfast
one morning,
you served fresh leeks,
slender
as fingers, from a sea goddess,
braised, with butter, delicate,
from the Altadena garden.
It was at your house
that I first drank
that clear heady liquor,
framboise,
an eau-de-vie, promising
that fruit did not have to be
fresh-cheeked, fat or stupid,
that it could read Proust,
or learn differential
equations.
The Saturnian taste
of old raspberries, and the moon’s
clear-fingered insistence
of leek. These two intangible things
I owe you,
along with — what? or
is there more?
The image of an onion, its sweet blanket layers.
The pebbled surface
of a raspberry.
~~~
Copyright 1989 Diane Wakoski. From Emerald Ice – Selected Poems 1962-1987, winner of the William Carlos Williams Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Included in Vox Populi for educational noncommercial purposes only.
Diane Wakoski (born 1937) is an American poet associated with the deep image poets, as well as the confessional and Beat poets of the 1960s.
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These two intangible things
I owe you,
along with — what? or
is there more?
What we owe each other—regardless any and all tangible or intangible differences—the debt, borrowing from Saint Paul borrowing from his Teacher: that we love one another.
“You may say I’m a dreamer….” Fine, then I am.
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Thanks, Brad. We owe everything to each other. No one stands alone.
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The poem is an eau-de-vie of thanks and wonder. I would gladly toast Wakoski and her friend with a taste of their framboise. And beachcomb, hoping to taste the salty sweetness of spindrift oranges.
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Yes!
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Another poet I wonder if I am discovering for the first time again. Senses engaged. Curious if it is Altadena near Pasadena California ( where I spent my early years) or the one in Texas. Love the textures.
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Diane is a brilliant poet and professor. I was fortunate to take courses with her at Michigan State University where she taught me the value of the unexpected image and of writing longer narrative poems. Thank you for sharing her poem today.
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She is a brilliant poet and teacher.
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How long since I’ve read this absolute master of our craft! Every element of this poem is alive, charged with its fullest nuance, and its been too long since I last saw her. Advent is truly upon us with this wonderful gift once beneath the tree, and now aloft in the breaths of an angel singing.
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Wakoski’s poems appeared in the 70s as an explosion of raw feeling. I remember reading her in 1976 and feeling they’d knocked the wind out of me. She is still writing great poems although they are more mature, more measured now.
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I forwarded the post today, have her email, copied to you Michael. We met in St Augustine at FLAC years ago, she has two titles on Anhinga, my first press. Rick Campbell!
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