The Celestial Tuber

"They eat a lot of French fries here," my mother
announces after a week in Paris, and she's right,
not only about les pommes frites but the celestial tuber
in all its forms: rotie, puree, not to mention
au gratin or boiled and oiled in la salade nicoise.
Batata edulis discovered by gold-mad conquistadors
in the West Indies, and only a 100 years later
in The Merry Wives of Windsor Falstaff cries
"Let the skie raine Potatoes," for what would we be
without you--lost in a sea of fried turnips,
mashed beets, roasted parsnips? Mi corazon, mon coeur,
my core is not the heart but the stomach, tuber
of the body, its hollow stem the throat and esophagus,
leafing out to the nose and eyes and mouth. Hail
the conquering spud, all its names marvelous: Solanum
teberosum, Igname, Caribe, Russian Banana, Yukon Gold.
When you turned black, Ireland mourned. O Mr. Potato Head,
how many deals can a man make before he stops being
small potatoes? How many men can a woman drop
like a hot potato? Eat it cooked or raw like an apple
with salt of the earth, apple of the earth, pomme de terre. 
Tuber, tuber burning bright in a kingdom without light,
deep within the earth where the Incan potoato gods rule,
forging their golden orbs for the world's ravening gorge.

Barbara Hamby, "Ode to the Potato," from Babel

And All the Bees Which in the Clover Dwell

It's all I have to bring today --
This, and my heart beside --
This, and my heart, and all the fields --
And all the meadows wide --
Be sure you count -- should I forget
Someone the sum could tell --
This, and my heart, and all the Bees
Which in the Clover dwell.

Emily Dickinson

Will, Shall

In formal writing, the future tense requires shall for the first person, will for the second and third. The formula to express the speaker's belief regarding a future action or state is I shall. I will expresses determination or consent. A swimmer in distress cries "I shall drown; no one will save me!" A suicide puts it the other way: "I will drown; no one shall save me!"

William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White, The Elements of Style

Tower Free Lock Free

Every morning in front of the mirror
I take the silver scissors
and cut my hair and my daughter's
shorter

the hand-maidens, the ladies
all snigger behind their veils
the queen gifts us with emerald-encrusted combs
pleads with me to stop this daily snip

my husband, my prince, talks soft in my ears
tells me we are safe

but all those years
I yanked brush through tangles
snarled in pain
all the years my neck bent
with the weight of wet
washed hair
all the hours sitting still
waiting within the spreadcircle of hair
a heavy cloak I could not set aside

It was not Dame Gothel's heavy climb
or you dear husband
that burdened my head
but the braided ropes tying my time in care

now my daughter runs hind-swift
and I, tower free lock free
gladly light-headed

Eve Rifkah, "Rapunzel After Her Marriage"

Misty Fields, Paradise

She says, "I am content when wakened birds,
before the fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings.

Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning," IV

Hair Pins/Thoroughly Modern Millie

My dentist, a lovely man, seemed charmed months ago when I answered that the chip in my front tooth is from a hair pin. He smiled and mentioned that they don't get many of those "these days." Vacuuming last week, when I had to take my vaccuum apart because it would not suck, I found six hairpins stuck length-wise, which were blocking muck from entering the vaccuum's sacred chambers. I step on hairpins, find them in the laundry, rusted in the tub, keep them in my wallet, use them as bookmarks. They live in dusty corners in my house, and I have used one to unlock a closed door more than once.

My old-fashiondy love for hair pins, handkerchiefs, gloves makes me wonder: Certainly other Thoroughly Modern Millies don't have this trouble; finding the evidence of "keep" doubly in vacuums, wallets, enamel. Where else are we to keep, if not between these delicate tines? So much does not hold, gives way. This seems a quiet place to hide, hoard. A spot for holding strands, souls, latches, teeth. Olly-olly oxen free.

For Skies of Couple-Colour as a Brinded Cow

Glory be to God for dappled things--
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in a stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change,
Praise him.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Pied Beauty"