Praises

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Praises



The vegetables please us with their modes and virtues.
                                                                                 The demure heart
Of the lettuce inside its circular court, baroque ear
Of quiet under its rustling house of lace, pleases
Us.
       And the bold strength of the celery, its green Hispanic
!Shout! its exclamatory confetti.

                                                      And the analogue that is Onion:
Ptolemaic astronomy and tearful allegory, the Platonic circles
Of His inexhaustible soul!
                                           O and the straightforwardness
In the labyrinth of Cabbage, the infallible rectitude of Homegrown Mushroom
Under its cone of silence like a papal hat -
                                                                       All these
Please us.

                  And the syllabus of the corn,
                                                                  that wampum,
                                                                                            its golden
Roads leading out of the wigwams of its silky and youthful smoke;
The nobility of the dill, cool in its silences and cathedrals;
Tomatoes five-alarm fires in their musky barrios, peas
Asleep in their cartridge clips
                                                  beetsblood,
                                                                      colonies of the imperial
Cauliflower, and the buddha-like seeds of the pepper
Turning their prayerwheels in the green gloom of their caves.
All these we praise: they please us all ways: these smallest virtues.
All these earth-given;
                                    and the heaven-hung fruit also...

                                                                                          As instance
Banana which continually makes angelic ears out of sour
Purses, or the winy abacus of the holy grape on its cross
Of alcohol, or the peach with its fur like a youg girl's -
All these we praise: the winter in the flesh of the apple, and the sun
Domesticated under the orange's rind.

                                                                       We praise
By the skin of our teeth, Persimmon, and Pawpaw's constant
Affair with gravity, and the proletariat of the pomegranate
Inside its leathery city.

                                      And let us praise all these
As they please us: skin, flesh, flower, and the flowering
Bones of their seeds: from which come orchards: bees: honey:
Flowers, love's language, love, heart's ease, poems, praise.



Thomas McGrath
 
 
I can't help but think of Pablo Neruda. Who else would praise a vegetable so? Well McGrath has taken a stab at it. The thought of a lettuce as a circular court, a house of rustling lace, it does please me. Celery like an exclamation, an onion with its Platonic circles, the labyrinth of cabbage – it doesn't even take a poet to recognize that similarity – but I love “the nobility of the dill, cool in its silences and cathedrals” - that is very very like how I have felt standing next to the dill plant in my mother's garden in the days when it still grew taller than me. “The sun domesticated under the orange's rind”, oh but I have the best painting of that to include here, if only I had the room. Yes, the “green gloom” of the pepper's cave, yes! How pleasing are these? Let us praise them – masterpieces that they are. Is it possible that with practice our praise could be as proficient as Pablo's and McGrath's? I'd like to think so.