The arrival of winter also brings a craving for soup, to warm us from the inside out. This week’s poem beautifully describes making broth.
It should be noted that for a poet like Richard Foerster, himself a master craftsman, this poem can also be read as an ars poetica, or a poem that explains the art of poetry. To make a great poem, one also needs “whatever bits we find at hand,” to be “Precise, / but not precise,” “to pique the senses,” and even to add a bit of “poison” to “exact the cure” that poems (and broth) provide.
Richard Foerster is the author of seven books, including his most recent, “River Road” (Texas Review Press, 2015). He has won many awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Maine Arts Commission. He lives in York, where he also works as a freelance editor and typesetter.
Broth
By Richard Foerster
Some days we cannot help
but stand, chilled to the marrow,
and so let the water brim
with whatever bits we find at hand,
then ease into the kettle the wrecked keel
of a chicken – how like an alchemist
anyone intent on making soup.
The onion, halved then quartered,
separates into a lifetime
of crescent moons, and the carrot’s
bright disks float like so many risings
gathered into a single day. Precise,
but not precise. It’s not so much practice
as instinct to know that six
peppercorns are enough to pique
the senses, or that a trickle
of salt, rolled from the palm, honors
the one that bore us and will swallow
us again. Somehow we learn
that the parsley must be bitter
as the earth after Eden and one smatter
of thyme is enough to soothe the soul.
We do not think twice about adding
the bay leaf with its tincture of poison.
When we ache, we’ll gladly shiver
to stir the broth, then sip, trusting
in the delicate balance of the common-
place to exact the cure.
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is Portland’s poet laureate. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 1998 Richard Foerster. It appeared originally in “Trillium” (BOA Editions, 1998) and appears here by permission of the author. For an archive of all the poems that have appeared in this column, go to www.pressherald.com/tag/deep-water.
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