(Comfort Food pic by Chris Nyles)
I have waited and left
And I am hoping that you’ve come
and found the place deserted just
as I helped myself to a bowl of hot, steaming congee
This is the first stanza of Adios , my first published poem in Sunday Inquirer Magazine circa 2000, I think. I am writing these lines from memory, not quite sure about the cuts for each line, having lost my copy of it except for that single tattered page which, cut out for posterity, is now hidden somewhere among the other tattered, forgotten papers piled neatly (not by me!) in a brown carton box at my mother’s house.
It is a simple poem from an aspiring poet. Now as I look at it again, I recognize this: Poetry and food, how both are metaphors for each other. Do you see it, the parallelism? How both appeal to our innate need for nourishment,for sustenance.
Food is not taste alone, it is not merely the play of flavors—sour, sweet, salty, tart. Nor of texture or colors. It is the whole experience of eating that we cherish—certainly part of it is the taste, the way it fills our hunger, but more than food itself, it is the memory of the place, a whiff, perhaps an unexpected, unfamiliar yet interesting aroma of herbs that you’ve encountered for the first time. Sometimes it is the memory of the event, how something as banal as pizza, or a burger becomes marked in you because it has defined a turning point in your life. I will always remember that pizza shop near my apartment which sells those thin crust pepperoni with pineapple and mushroom pizzas, the same pizza that a former love brought over the last time we talked and told each other the truth. It signalled an ending, a good yet ordinary pizza now associated with closure.
In the same vein, I will always love takoyaki, those japanese balls made up of octopus bits, floury batter, topped with mayo and bonito flakes. It was the one food that I always looked out for and bought at the basement deli of a Yokohama department store at 50% off an hour before closing time. These takoyaki balls are forever my comfort food, edible memories of my first stab at independence, how if you wait long enough (like if you hang around at groceries in Japan near closing time) you will get the good stuffs, sometimes at a better price.
We make and meet friends often in the safety of dining, food becoming this blanket of comfort and security. We sometimes mend our souls with food, with an ice cream or two to cheer us up after a bad day. Each of us, that is one thing we share. How we have a memory of comfort, or of happiness, of joy that is associated with food, or the act of eating. So it is that we are so fortunate, don’t you think? That we are given this power to cherish food and appreciate our acts of savoring these morsels, spawning rituals of dining and even seduction all tied in to the sense of taste and deliciousness, that we are above looking at food as only things we need to cram into our bodies so as not to die.
The experience of food is complex as it is memorable to us. And so is poetry, although most people turn away from it. It has such a bad rep, my beloved poetry, that it is staid and too hoity-poity but in truth it can fill us up too. This mix-up of emotions I could not find words to describe, sometimes, in the hands of a better mind or a true poet, in his hand he forms a ball of words, rolling off his life, his own milleu and then I come across it and I could only sigh and be thankful that there is poetry, how it is recreates, reflects, reveals life in short intense breaths.
Here let me share one poem, comfort food for the bitch-goddess in each us :)
What Do Women Want
by Kim Addonizio
I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what's underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I'm the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment
from its hanger like I'm choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I'll wear it like bones, like skin,
it'll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.
