Soup, and: Island
- Soup, and: Island
Soup
When the doctor said I've got good news and bad news,I thought of soup—how long it had beensince I had had the homemade kind,the real deal where you soak the beans overnightand everything is apportioned in stages:first the onions and meat browned in oil,then the broth added for hours of simmering,all that saturated glistering scent stoking the housewith memories: the Jewish boy I kisseduntil we both sank to our knees in the grass,my mother's frown as she plucked weedsfrom my hair—oh my mother will die from this,my mother whose soup is the besteven though it was always oversalted becauseit was labored over, it was ladled outunconditionally, tendered sweetlywithout consequences, a nonjudicial love—and it was always soup I got first thingin the sickbed, and there's the way tomatoes are addedat the last moment but the minor vegetables(peas and corn and tiny diced potatoes)come in thirty minutes before that, and howthe spices—ah, the spices—are to be doled outsparingly, waiting to see how strong they'd becomein the brew, their hidden aptitudes unlockedonly by time and the heat of a burbling mélange;and the way my apron always got stainedbut I wouldn't wash it, proud of the messfor once, making mistakes, sloshing and dripping. [End Page 76] Yes, soup was what I wanted: not newsbut the slow courage of the lentilas it softened, its heart splitting into wings;not good cop bad cop but the swift metallic smackof too much thyme administered hastily,the kind of mistake you never make again.Bread, too; I wanted the whole thick crusty hump of itlaid out for vivisection (here is my body eat)and lots of red wine that always feels like it's greasing my boneswith lava (here is my blood) …and then the bad news came (who ever listens to the good?)and before I answered, before the questionsand the arched eyebrow of my husbandstanding in the doorway could fall intopity and helplessness, I thought YesI'll make soup tonight, a soup fit for the gods.
Island
A room in one's headis for thinkingoutside of the box,though the box is stillthere—cosmic cage,Barnum's biggest, proudest Ring.My land: a chair, four stickswith a board laid across:This is the raftI pile my dreams on,set out to sea.Look for me, shore. [End Page 77]
Rita Dove, recipient of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Thomas and Beulah, was US poet laureate from 1993 to 1995. Author of numerous books, most recently Sonata Mulattica and Collected Poems 1974–2004, she also edited The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Her many honors include the 2019 Wallace Stevens Award, the 2011 National Medal of Arts from President Obama, the 1996 National Humanities Medal from President Clinton, and twenty-eight honorary doctorates, among them from Yale and Harvard. Dove is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia.
