Dream Broth

The seeds of all my seasons come together in a soup of something I could once taste but hold in my mouth now like water. Everything is here: sweetness cupped in kernels that distill its flavors down like some old mill. White corn gone to tassel late in summer, hot from fire and swimming in some kind of honeyed brine that tastes like weathered wood and nothing I can name, a leftover solstice mix fierce and slow with underpinnings of rot and adventure, a taste of singe and lakewater, of a wet moon and its spell. It carries too the haunted pucker of October, the sour whimsy of collapsing things in ruined little gardens. A mystery, sliced in half when I wasn’t looking and offered with one hand out and one hand hidden. Pepper plays with it well and coaxes it into almost giving itself up. When I try to figure it out it almost leaves. It tickles like I imagine the folds of snowflakes’ edges would, a tumble of melting angles in my throat. Most times too it trails a residue of spice---shyer than nutmeg and wilder than something like paprika. I can’t name it but it has its own way of warming me, a heat gentled by the ways I get to know it and by the slick and chilly film of spring, of cool things breathing water as they birth. It wants to be raw but simmers. I don’t season it but wait for it to tell me what it needs. Sometimes it’s cream to cradle it and make it younger, to soften up its brazen twiggy heart. It might be a sprig of rosemary, nipped from the bush by the train tracks, or the green of wild young onion, raised up from feral earth and brought inside. Other days I’ve sensed a flush of rosehip, much too sweet for its own good, a blast of death inside it like the blasphemous hymn I found myself humming at dusk in April as a child. I’ve needed it for days now but it won’t come. There’s nothing written down for me to go by. I play and add and mix and stir but nothing lets me name it, and there I am again with that drink of simple water, limned by none of the grit and gruel I’m used to getting. I cradle it against my tongue and then it’s mine: an emptying fix for all my angry fullness, a hex of chaliced shadow warm as earth, my only season now its gulp of dwindling sun and ragged twilight wind.

--lks March 2009