"A Small Breath": Of Ripeness and Rot

I've been busy applying for jobs this week, so I haven't been posting as much here as I would like. I did, however, spend last night making salsa with my mom. The recipe she uses involves cutting up lots and lots and lots of tomatoes, peppers, onions, and garlic; dumping in vinegar and a few spices; boiling for about an hour; and pouring the delicious mess into sterilized jars (note the empty jars heating at the back of the stove and the boiled rings and flats in the front).Because you don't boil the filled and lidded jars like you do in conventional canning, the salsa is only shelf-stable for three to six months.However, last month I made some sweet pickles with my grandmother the conventional way, and they'll stay fresh for at least a year, if not longer.The salsa turned out really well, and it's nice to have a healthy snack hanging around the house since it deters me from more baking!

I've been enjoying the local August produce here, the farmers' markets and contributions from friends' gardens, and I've been reading James Peterson's Vegetables, which covers the basics of how to cook different types of fresh veggies. Having grown up on canned and frozen vegetables, I've never cooked many types of fresh produce. I haven't tried any of Peterson's recipes yet, but his how-to section has given me the courage to take on the plastic sack of summer squash sitting on my parents' counter (delicious creamy gratin, here I come!).

The only problem with all this produce is how quickly it spoils, how willingly the peppers shrivel, the peaches wrinkle and sag, the cucumbers embitter and turn translucent, and the corn husks blight over with moldy blotches. My parents and I eat so much (nectarines for breakfast, tomatoes and cucumbers for lunch, peppers and corn and and zucchini for dinner, watermelon for dessert), and we still throw so much away. And outside, the weather mimics the produce, so that each day the air belches and smothers with its cloying heat, soggy humidity, and myriad stinks that rise from the over-heated earth and sagging, flaccid foliage. The sky is too ripe, too full, it seems, flushing with heat as the hemisphere teeters unwillingly on the edge of fall.

All this puts me in mind of Theodore Roethke's brilliant second collection The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948). It's a book full of vegetable life that is, for Roethke, rife with meaning and terror, the violence of life and the sensuous rot of death. He seems galled by the processes of the earth, and the poems that result are descriptively rich and emotional.

Here are two of my favorite poems from The Lost Son. Naturally, they appear one right after the other in the text.

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Root Cellar

Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,

Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,

Shoots dangled and drooped,

Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates,

Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.

And what a congress of stinks!--

Roots ripe as old bait,

Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,

Leaf-mould, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.

Nothing would give up life:

Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

Forcing House

Vines tougher than wrists

And rubbery shoots,

Scums, mildews, smuts along stems,

Great cannas or delicate cyclamen tips,--

All pulse with the knocking pipes

That drip and sweat,

Sweat and drip,

Swelling the roots with steam and stench,

Shooting up lime and dung and ground bones,--

Fifty summers in motions at once,

As the live heat billows from pipes and pots.