Brooding Over Butternut

I have spent so long trying to find another good poem about orange or about squash that I probably could have written my own in less time.  But I did finally find a marvelous one for today's All About Orange installment of Now Serving: Bidding Butternut Bonne Nuit.

First, the poem.  Which is actually part of an art installment and it goes with the picture below, neither of which is my own:









Conversation - Poem on Edward Weston's "Squash" (commissioned for a centennial project of the Yale Art Gallery)


"Delve for me, delve down, delve past your body, crowned
by its hidden stem, into shadowy alarm;
you will not vanish past our dark-shed charm,
throat over throat, ankle to ankle, bound
in our different arches, summer-nicked and browned
interlocking rings in the chain of wrist and arm."

"Lie for me, lie, and I will feel you turn.
Mark out the summer's bending time. Yes, learn
to cradle the concrete ground to softness.  Stay.
Measure me past my stem, though your shadows churn;
Close yourself over; encompass me like clay."

-Annie Finch (2000)


Sigh.  I wish i could write like that.  But I am not a poet, I am a painter (ha ha).  And sometimes, a cook.  And sometimes, I paint with food.