Society of Ethnobiology Lunch

Wild stinging nettle and oyster soup garnished with sea asparagus, goosenecked barnacles and flavored with grand fir oil.

Fresh, wild Chinook salmon glazed with birch syrup, served with a wild, trailing blackberry glaze, grilled nodding onions, and fiddleheads garnished with wild sorrel.

Wild soapberry ice cream
Sweet woodruff sorbet
Candied sea lettuce, served with wild, candy cap mushroom (Lactarius fragilies) ice cream and a red huckleberry compote

I've been working on a menu poem. I'm including the main plates here and leaving out most of the other text. It may seem rather abstract, but don't you get carried away by the stinging nettles, sea asparagus and sweet woodruff sorbet? I've edited these dishes a few times, and included a few poisonous items on accident.

Image via

words

I left a couple of words for you on the tablecloth last night - you covered them with your elbows.

Image via

Now, in my house of one thousand paintings

I salt my soup with the dust of colored chalk.
I have bright green fingertips
like ten live spirits in ten forest robes.
My fingers are flowing with green
like a woman who suckles ten children.
Now my children have grown tall as trees.

-Excerpt from Penelope Scambly Schott's  "How We All Came to Survive”

Penelope let me into her poetry workshop even though I mistakenly inserted an "r" into her middle name. What would it mean to be scrambly? A bit confused and messy, certainly fast-moving. Very lively.

Tadzio has wrapped up his second year at the French school and summer has finally arrived. I promised myself that at the end of the school year I would start working on my application for Canadian residency. I'm a little afraid of it. I'll overcome the fear and the paperwork and start gathering up my documents. Not the sort of task that one usually picks up at the start of summer, but timing is important.

image via

You do not have to be good

You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

-Mary Oliver "Wild Geese"

Image via

cowbells collect the evening

 

Cowbells collect the evening. We are pulled

to the bare kitchen bulb like large moths,
while milking-shed cats curl into straw.

At a rosewood table in a paneled room
middle-aged men in wide leather chairs
sip twenty-year-old single-malt scotch.

Under the white kitchen light
clover honey melts into biscuits;
nobody is starving; nobody weeps.

The men in their nail-studded armchairs
caress their knuckles and nod their chins,
quite certain they have never been wrong.

The chorus of cowbells ka-bong rattle-rattle,
the chorus of crystal shot glasses set down,
chorus of moths beating powdered wings,

while out by the bins behind the Club
a woman who stole one sharpened pencil
is carving this song into her skin.

-Penelope Scambly Schott

Incidental Music for the 6:00 pm news

Image via

pony party

Today is my birthday. You know, after all of these years, I still think that a pony birthday party is the best. I wish you could join me. We could have cake and champagne and ride the little guys around the stable. As we rode, we could talk about birthdays and how interesting it is to grow older. As someone who never expected to age past twenty-three, there is something quite magical about it all.

In the spirit of celebrating our mortality and relationships with beasts, here is a poem by Jack Gilbert, from The Great Fires.

I never thought Michiko would come back
after she died. But if she did, I knew
it would be as a lady in a long white dress.
It is strange that she has returned
as somebody's dalmatian. I meet
the man walking her on a leash
almost every week. He says good morning
and I stoop down to calm her. He said
once she was never like that with
other people. Sometimes she is tethered
on their lawn when I go by. If nobody
is around, I sit on the grass. When she
finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap
and we watch each other's eyes as I whisper
in her soft ears. She cares nothing about
the mystery. She likes it best when
I touch her head and tell her small
things about my days and our friends.
That makes her happy the way it always did.


Images by Lo Bjurulf