twelve quarts of peaches,
seven pints of plums,
six pints of salsa.
Half-pints of jam, jelly:
strawberry, apricot, chokecherry.
A good shot, I think—
the contrasting colors,
the shine of the jars.
Most of it's gone now.
Last jar of peaches just emptied;
only apricot jam left (nobody's favorite).
Berries will come first. Then apricots,
peaches, plums, tomatoes.
Ritual of filling the canner, bathing the jars
with boiling water. Lids hot, syrup bubbling.
All the precautions against a faulty seal
letting in deadly spores.
Steam jostling the canner lid.
Kitchen sticky with fruit.
Bright sweetness preserved,
made to disappear.
5 comments:
Saints preserve us (or preserves, saint us) I saw those jewelled jam jars in that first stanza.....
I'd like more about the "ritual" of it - the jars gave the stained glass effect (you could mention that or not)....prayers and precautions? okay maybe I'm going overboard.
there is something very religious about canning, though :)
Because the poem opens with someone showing someone else not the pantry itself but a picture of the pantry, I sort of want the narrator to drift back to the photo/album by poem's end...
I also have a question. What is the relationship between the two people in the poem - or between the narrator and her/his intended audience. You seem to invoke it/us and I want to see you do something with it...
this is lovely, could we have the actual colours of the fruit and vegs?
also, could I have the apricot jam? who the heck doesn't like apricot jam? yum!
Hi Joanne,
It feels to me like most of this poem is relating the Ritual of jam-making. Because there is so much here, I wonder if you perhaps need to choose your theme with more certainty(?). The first half shows, the second half tells of how they came to be..hmm..maybe it's a question of order, then. I'm not sure, and I'm just throwing some ideas out there which I hope might be helpful to you.
: )marjo
I don't like apricot jam (I'm a marmalade girl myself).
I like the way the poem moves backwards, moving from eating the preserves to canning. That said, perhaps the last two lines are a bit redundant, in that it comes around too full circle?
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