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Articles/Essays – Volume 35, No. 1
Balsamic Vinegar
[Editor’s Note: The boxes have been used to attempt to follow the design in the PDF. For the full experience of the poem, see PDF below]
| I didn’t go for vinegar but for the smell of life for organic tomatoes not mall tomatoes of feldspar or other inorganic stuff | Sure. I was vulnerable to vinegar not steeled against seduction |
| I went for narrow aisles to brush against purple leeks galvanized tubs of flowers so intense their blues need more than eyes to smell crimsons more than tongue and pores to see. | But I had not planned even to think of four ounces of balsamic that cost more than some make in a day |
| Cheeses and mushrooms and other mold with French and Danish names chocolate dark and tart and strong fruit to eat and suck and paint | A bottle in a wooden box. (I had hesitated to buy an upgrade casket for my father that would just be buried anyway. People knew my love for him did not need gilded coffin.) |
| A place too simple for America but right here just the same | Vinegar dearer for its hardwood case, reared for generations in casks of mulberry, juniper, chestnut and cherry wood as lovingly as wine, but no inebriation, except of soul |
| As if fresh were a new idea exuding from squash not yet dead, not pandering of orange juice concentrated and calcified | I bought the pedigreed, handcrafted gall to celebrate new life awake and clear |