Friday, 10.13:
a pinched never doesn’t just go sway. What are you going?
–via T, a text message posted to one of his friends.
Myristica fragrans
Common name: Nutmeg
Always a bit off-balance,
one stands on a chair, on tiptoe.
Fumbles amid the fragrant small containers.
Shoves the history aside.
One would prefer to forget the great Dutch galleons
pressing in at the tiny islands of Banda
and the thin face of Jan Pieterszoon Coen
framed in a starched ruff.
How he spoke his simple orders.
How the Dutch in their gleaming armor
drove the young men of Banda over the cliffs.
How their blood scented the water.
How soldiers gathered the native planters together,
beheading them one by one,
the heads rotting on pikes, the attar of them
drifting for days.
How by this means the Dutch East India Company
savored its luscious success.
One would prefer to forget.
For the Christmas guests are all in the living room, laughing.
And so one taps the jar, and so the eggnog
is fragrant with this forgetting
and with rum, too, though that is another story.
:: Maryann Corbett, in One, issue 13
Tuesday, 10.17:
What if what we call attraction is merely a sense of relief at no longer pushing the same dull hope around the yard? What if the desire we’ve collared and chained to a locust tree decides to stop digging at its hot spots, licking raw the itch? Of course we come unmoored. Of course we call it falling—such relief to finally collapse into another’s idea of who we might have been.
Reads in the Trees 