It’s two days from the election. I don’t know about you, but I’m anxious as all-get-out, as my grandaddy would have said.
I thought about finding a poem about anxiety, or something noble about love of country. But I decided we need a moment of comfort above all. Pie! I adore chocolate pie from Grand Traverse Pie Company. I also love cherry pies from King Orchard. They have lots of cherries, not filler. I have their recipe and when I’m not being lazy, I make it many times over the summer for kids and grandkids.
Alberto Rios writes what is essentially an ode — a poem in praise of something, often humble, but raising the tone to near-elegance — a formality. Keats, Pablo Neruda, Alexander Pope, to name a few poets, wrote odes. It’s a tradition that goes back to the Greeks and the Romans.
He starts with the reputation of pies. Pies are what they are. They don’t fret about tomorrow. You could say they’re very Zen that way. Rios enumerates all the things pies aren’t about — getting a job, studying, getting ahead in business.
“A pie gets one chance.” I wouldn’t have thought of that line, but it’s so perfect I don’t have to talk about how perfect it is. You know it. And the rest of that first section is pure praise of the beauty and the comfort of a pie. My favorite line is “A full pound of round sound,” the sound being “Ahh” of course.
Then Rios avoids making a syrupy poem by changing course. In the second section (notice I didn’t say stanza. He has used numbers for even more separation), to the pies we aren’t that crazy about. The ones left over at Thanksgiving. Mincemeat, for example. He takes the point of view of the unwanted pies, their jealousy of the fancy pecan pies, their defense of their own history. People used to like them. People used to use lard, for example. But things have changed.
So pies have hidden in other things, like sweet pizzas. But a pie is a pie, and never was good for more than its day. Fashions are fickle. It used to be Jell-O people wanted, tomorrow it’ll be cake. I notice how the half-rhyme — day and cake — and the regular rhythm like a nursery rhyme in those last two lines, give a sense of ending, like closing a door.
Nothing deep and complicated here, but still, the poem does go deeper into the joy of pies, and their ephemeral quality, than you might have thought. It gives me a new angle.
You might like to read about Alberto Rios and his being forced to write in English instead of Spanish. He teaches at Arizona State University and his poetry has won many awards.
November 02, 2020 at 01:00AM
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On Poetry: Counting the ways we love pie for comfort in an anxious time - Cadillac News
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