Soup and bread.

Today I spent a lot of time with this guy, and all the people who talk about him:

Francis Bacon A Terrible Beauty from Feenish Productions on Vimeo.

It was a quiet day. I told a friend, with whom I briefly chatted, that I feel like I've been waiting for this--for the quiet, when I could sink into the project of a poem--for such a long time. It was wonderful.

I made my breakfast and read the paper. I set to work. I retrieved a book I have about Bacon and his studio. I read multiple accounts and interpretations of the studio reconstruction, the moving of the studio at 7 Reece Mews in South Kensington to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin.

I realized I didn't have an idea for the beginning of the poem. That's okay. What's wonderful to me about this process is that sometimes the poem comes to you, overtakes you, the shape of it and most of the words or tropes, and you just channel that overtaking and get it written down. After that, you can revise and revise away. But sometimes, the idea of a poem crystallizes slowly. Layers and layers, arriving in stages. Once, Larry Levis, in a workshop, told another poet that his draft was one of those that you could work away on for awhile, a slow process, like making stock for a soup. You would work on it but it would need time to develop. The way he talked about it, it sounded like pleasure.

I had a day filled with this pleasure.

I also had lunch with my son, where we talked about basketball. When we got home, we took a look at one of the couches in our living room--Bruiser had, in his goings and comings, basically disarranged the entire cushion set up. Also, the cushions looked dingy. We agreed, basically on a dare, to take the coverings off and wash them. They are hanging dry as we speak, much brighter and cleaner. Also, I vacuumed copious amounts of dog hair in the bed of the couch. Wow, is all I can say.

And made carrot soup and corn bread. The carrot soup had onion and garlic, some sweet peppers and a jalapeño, all sweated in olive oil then simmered in stock, then blended. Coriander and cumin as well. The corn bread, I made in a pie tin. It's a recipe I have been making for decades:

1 1/4 c. flour
3/4 c. corn meal
a little sugar
1 t. baking powder
1/4 t. salt
1 egg
1 c. milk
1/4 c. safflower oil

Stir the wet ingredients into the dry with a whisk with a few strokes, till the batter is almost smooth but not quite. Bake at 375 for 25 min. or so, till a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean. Butter, honey, etc.

I want weeks and weeks with days like this in them.

Lazy, a little bit. Or a lot.

Well,

After getting back from Idaho on Saturday, and on Monday having the Fourth of July barbecue at my daughter's (fun!), and on Tuesday, having a haircut and a meeting and some hours writing a little bit strenuously and sweatily and not very attractively, I'm telling you, and then seeing a movie and meeting with my book group (fun!),

I have settled into the following routine:

• wake up not very early.
• loll around until later than that.
• make breakfast, or
• possibly whine about the fact that there is no bread for toast.
• take Bruiser for a walk when it's less cool than it would have been if I'd taken him earlier, when I was still (a) waking up not very early, or (b) lolling around until later than that, or (c) making breakfast, or (d) possibly whining about no bread, or (e) all of the above.
• take a shower.
• look at who knows what on the internet while
• contemplating what else I could/should be doing.

It's not very productive, I am forced to admit. I am "writing" and "making a film," but the measurable outcome is infinitessimal. Like, for instance, if someone were making a documentary of my summer writing/filmmaking, and they did time-lapse photography, maybe over the course of several days you might see a half of a haiku emerge.

Not really. It's more like a big messy spill of bleah, out of which might be excavated a haiku. But no one really wants to see time-lapse photography of that, do they? Or do they? I wish, maybe, I could make that movie.

Or not.

Actually, I am reasonably happy making the movie I'm making. It has lots of parts to it, and many pieces of footage, and decisions to make about what goes where, and what I should say in my voiceover, and so forth. So away I go, to look at the footage some more and take a few more notes and maybe write the other half of that metaphorical haiku. Or maybe just a half of the other half. I don't want to rush it.

In case you're interested, I am making salad for dinner. And toast. Because now there is bread, which around here, we like to call "progress."

Nuts for the winter.

The historian asked me, "You don't think Bruiser is getting. I mean, you don't think he has even a little extra, because . . . "

We both have our eyes on this question because last spring my kids' dad greeted Bruiser with a "Getting a little fat, Bruiser?" Which stung us, I confess, and we were all, No he isn't! And after that, we were all, Is he?

"You're supposed to be able to feel their ribs," I said, feeling his ribs.

"Can you feel them?"

Of course I could, but there was quite a bit of dog hair between my fingers and his ribs, otherwise known as "fur." Which complicates the question. Of course we could feel his ribs! Of course we could.

Maybe someone should devise a "feel the ribs" test for all of us, since, with the weather getting cold, we're all observing the evolutionary imperative to store up fat. Yeah, evolutionary imperative! But I want to tell you that soup may be the answer. Answer to what? Why, what to eat when the weather gets cold, that's what.

"I hope you don't mind having soup night after night," I said to the historian, since tonight was night three of my new initiative, "Soup Night After Night." Let me tell you about it:

Night 1: Vegetarian Chili and Quesadillas. I used dried black beans that I have had for, I think, a hundred years, literally, as well as assorted this and that, farmer's market onions and garlic and peppers, and roasted tomatoes. It made a delicious follow-up lunch burrito and another delicious follow-up bowl the day after that.

Night 2: Onion Soup with a Lovely Crouton, accompanied by a green salad. The secret to onion soup is to cook the onions forever, slowly, in butter until they caramelize. You could use oil, but why, when there's butter? I used a yellow, a white, and a red onion, as well as some garlic. Also, I find that a tiny little tip of something extra in the soup deepens and complexifies the flavor, like wine or even a tiny bit of balsamic vinegar. I am not ashamed to say that I use vegetarian vegetable bouillon cubes. This soup was awesome.

Night 3: Potage Bonne Femme* with Caprese Salad and Peach-Blueberry Crisp for dessert. I added two potatoes and a bunch of carrots to the leftover onion soup, some more water and an additional bouillon cube. Once the vegetables were falling apart, I blended the whole thing. I thought about adding some milk, but it was unnecessary. This soup is unbelievably delicious, considering its humble ingredients. I was particularly proud of the way I troped the previous night's dinner into tonight's. High five to myself! It's still blowing my mind that I have wonderful tomatoes and basil. But I do. And the crisp I made from some of the half a lug (that sounds about right) of peaches we cut up and froze a month ago, as well as blueberries I froze when they were kind of cheap. (*original recipe, adapted here, given to me when I was a young wife by my oldest friend--and still going strong!)

Someone still has to do the dishes, however. Where's the evolutionary imperative for that, I ask you?