I wrote a piece this morning that was fun and adventurous, and about beets. Much like the essay I also have posted on this blog, this one was about food. I hope that you, whoever you are--the reader-- do not find it boring. It was inspired by a James Tate poem called The Radish and like I said, was fun, new and different for me. Here it is. Enjoy.
September 22nd 2009 Autumnal Equinox
The beet
There is a lone beet lurking in the refrigerator. It sits in the drawer with the prettier potatoes and carrots, all of which are scrubbed clean and shiny. The beet can be scrubbed, but it can never be shiny. It does not sparkle, but absorbs light. The beet’s real show is inside its bloody center. You cut a beet in half and stand back from the splatter; it’s like a Tarentino film, gory yet wonderful. The beet oozes its essence on to the cutting board. Dramatic? It can’t help but be dramatic. Your hands, the knife, the counter, the floor all will be magenta-colored in the blood bath as you chop and dice the beet. It gets under your nails and the smell of earth fills your nose. The soup pot will become like a millpond, full of mossy, dirt smells and water teeming with flavor. Add onion and cabbage and carrot to the pot to keep the beet company, and it will bleed all over them, staining them purple and red. Don’t forget salt and pepper and the stewed tomatoes. Adding more redness to the mess. Place the lid on the pot and let it boil. Boil, boil toil and trouble the witches say in Macbeth. I bet they were stirring a pot of borscht while doling out bloody omens. Serve your borscht with sour cream to sooth the tang. Take a spoonful and taste, close your eyes and think of the garden, the innocuous-looking beet leaves blazing out of the soil. You pulled them from the ground and beheld this tuber, this awkward, dirty root vegetable. You washed and put it in the fridge and now it’s swimming about in your mouth, and down your throat. You swallow and it fills you. You slurp up the whole bowl of borscht, you can’t help it, you are like one possessed. You put the bowl down, only to have it filled again by a pushy hostess. You empty it again within you, and your skin takes on a faint lavender color. You have another bowl, and now you are blushing the hue of beet, it has imbibed you with its juices and you are stained as if with beet jaundice. You refuse another bowl, reeling. Can you cry as Lady Macbeth? Out, out damn spot? No, for it is not a spot, but yourself that is red. You have become the beet, as it has become you. You sprout leaves from you the top of your head and look for a soft place to lay, to plant yourself; waiting for the next unsuspecting, innocent cook to pull you from the ground and place you in a soup pot.
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