95 ~ Harvest feasts, harvest gifts, and the universe of shimmer
Happy Harvest “Supermoon” everyone. A nice thing about producing your own food is the opportunity to share it – a gift of the local, made by your own hand. And under these magical days of September, with the gardens in their last great push of offerings, and trout season still on, with the streams more fishable under cooler skies, it’s a good time to be harvesting and giving.
Last week a friend from Bainbridge Island, Washington, Jim, visited me at the house for the first time. I made an autumn harvest lunch for us – nearly everything from the land here (or from my nephew Keegan’s land in Italy). Our menu (above) was sliced cucumbers and dill with sour cream from my neighbor’s cows, tomatoes with basil and Keegan’s olive oil, fried wild brown trout, and new potatoes with rosemary.
To tie up these gifts at the end we dove into some apple pies I’d baked (my coy apple trees finally produced a good crop this year). The sweetspot I’ve found for a good crust is 3/4 good butter and 1/4 goose fat – the latter saved and frozen from my annual tradition of roasting a goose in mid-winter.
With the end of Wisconsin’s trout season approaching (October 15), I’ve been getting some last licks in on smoking trout (and some smaller creek chubs caught while prospecting for trout). It’s a simple process on my Weber grill, and the end product is delicious, and easy to either store or share with others.
When Jim arrived last week, I’d just taken a batch of trout off the smoker. When he looked at the plate of bronzed beauties in the kitchen, he scrolled through his phone and read this, to me and to the trout. Enjoy, as I very much did.
A Display of Mackerel
by Mark Doty
They lie in parallel rows,
on ice, head to tail,
each a foot of luminosity
barred with black bands,
which divide the scales'
radiant sections
like seams of lead
in a Tiffany window.
Iridescent, watery
prismatics: think abalone,
the wildly rainbowed
mirror of a soap-bubble sphere,
think sun on gasoline.
Splendor, and splendor,
and not a one in any way
distinguished from the other
--nothing about them
of individuality. Instead
they're all exact expressions
of the one soul,
each a perfect fulfillment
of heaven's template,
mackerel essence. As if,
after a lifetime arriving
at this enameling, the jeweler's
made uncountable examples
each as intricate
in its oily fabulation
as the one before;
a cosmos of champleve.
Suppose we could iridesce,
like these, and lose ourselves
entirely in the universe
of shimmer--would you want
to be yourself only,
unduplicatable, doomed
to be lost? They'd prefer,
plainly, to be flashing participants,
multitudinous. Even on ice
they seem to be bolting
forward, heedless of stasis.
They don't care they're dead
and nearly frozen,
just as, presumably,
they didn't care that they were living:
all, all for all,
the rainbowed school
and its acres of brilliant classrooms,
in which no verb is singular,
or every one is. How happy they seem,
even on ice, to be together, selfless,
which is the price of gleaming.