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“Olives” by A.E. Stallings
Sometimes a craving comes for salt, not sweet,
For fruits that you can eat
Only if pickled in a vat of tears-
A rich and dark and indehiscent meat
Clinging tightly to the pit-on spears
Of toothpicks, maybe, drowned beneath a tide
Of vodka and vermouth,
Rocking at the bottom of a wide,
Shallow, long-stemmed glass, and gentrified;
Or rustic, on a plate cracked like a tooth-
A miscellany of the humble hues
Eponymously drab-
Brown greens and purple browns, the blacks and blues
That chart the slow chromatics of a bruise-
Washed down with swigs of barrel wine that stab
The palate with pine-sharpness. They recall
The harvest and its toil,
The nets spread under silver trees that foil
The blue glass of the heavens in the fall-
Daylight packed in treasuries of oil,
Paradigmatic summers that decline
Like singular archaic nouns, the troops
Of hours in retreat. These fruits are mine-
Small bitter drupes
Full of the golden past and cured in brine.
(First published in The New Criterion, June 2006)
HT: Serious George
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Gloomy conservatives
loved it.
Don’t know exactly why, but I love an ode to something seemingly ordinary.
Seeing God in the details is worshipful, whether you want it to be or not.
I can appreciate it as a poem, but as I have never liked olives, it’s hard to appreciate the ode to them.
Exquisitely beautiful. Thanks.
Made me thirsty for a martini, and I don’t even like martinis.
Loved it almost as much as the kalamata olives on the pizza we had for lunch. Yum.
That line, “pickled in a vat of tears” is quite nice, all the more for how the poet then rhymes it with “spears” — those toothpicks and the martinis that try to hide the tears.
Thanks
Tell you what, RR…..you make the martinis, and I’ll start on the olive tapenaude for the bruschetta.
I really liked it, maybe just because I love olives. It makes me feel less dorky for writing a poem (at fourteen or fifteen) about mushrooms while my mom sautéed them.