A day, if a day could feel
must feel like soup du jour
A day, if a day could feel, must feel like a bowl
Scented—as the curve of the bowl is—
with cardamom, star anise, long pepper, cinnamon, hyssop.
Excerpts from Jane Hirshfield’s poem “The Bowl”
I’m not including the rest of the poem because I don’t like the rest of the poem. I don’t even really understand what Hirshfield means. I think it’s maybe a metaphor about the day being a container for everything that happens. Like a Buddhist monk’s begging bowl, receiving exactly what is given. But I love the double confusion of the first line. “If a day could feel” animates the day. Turns it into a being that has the capacity to feel. But then the day becomes our object again. Someone, presumably someone who is not the day, may touch it and feel it and notice its bowl-like texture and shape.
Sitting down and thinking of this poem at the end of the Gregorian calendar, I misremembered that line. I thought it went:
The day, if a day could feel, would feel like a bowl
And when I tried to remember the other line I loved, I could only remember:
hyssop, hyssop, hyssop.
-
Soup du jour fits in whatever size container you put it in. A cup costs less than a bowl, but these days even a cup of soup costs a lot. Like the container is finite but the soup is amorphous.
I mean, if the day could feel, if the day could emote, if the day could live, it would probably be more apt to compare it to soup.
When I’m spacing out, my mind goes on tangents like this.
We call it soup du jour, not quotidian soup. This is because quotidian means daily in the mundane sense, and soup du jour is special. And I know that it is special because it is written on the specials board.
This is my method. I come across a word in a poem and decide that it is special. Usually, I become focused on the words I don’t understand. Sometimes the word is specific, like hyssop. Sometimes the word is broad, like day. When I set my sights on a word I like, I end up seeing it everywhere. Or I make conditions to understand the word better. For example, with the hyssop, I didn’t know what it looked or smelled like. So I planted some. And every time I came to my small flowerbed this summer, my shoulders would relax and I would enthusiastically whisper, hyssop. Or a friend would visit and I’d say, you wanna come see the hyssop? I’d invite them to touch the leaves.
Hyssop became important to me. I like this word because it evokes hyssop; the aroma, the appearance, the whole thing. I like that the word is pretty meaningless unless you yourself have smelled it, seen it, known it in some way. When I became acquainted with hyssop, our relationship became like a fun secret. Like, I know you. There are no words to explain this knowledge. We had to relate, and meet. What’s cool is that’s true of every word.
So day evokes day the way hyssop evokes hyssop.
In defining a central tenant of Imagism, Ezra Pound wrote
Go in fear of abstraction.
And what I’m saying is that I think a word will always be an abstraction, but it’s like a map, a hint, that can guide one closer to the life stuff.
-
All year I was thinking about days. Day became a special word. I read it everywhere. I read it in the light.
One day a few days ago, I was resting beside my friend Ava. I had a vision of Ava as a younger person. And then I suddenly remembered being a younger person. This memory sparked a thought. I had a thought about a day. It is a thought that I cannot articulate. In the same way that I cannot tell you hyssop, I can only lead you to it.
And so the day was on my mind when my friend Walter told me they’d never read Walt Whitman, which was peculiar to me because they both share the same first name. I gasped. So Walter got Leaves of Grass out from the library and I read “Song of Myself” aloud in its entirety while Walter fell asleep on the floor. I did this because I think it’s meant to be read aloud, as Whitman writes:
(It is you talking just as much as myself, I act as the tongue of you,
Tied in your mouth, in mine it begins to be loosen’d.)
Which gives me chills every time. Since I’ve been thinking about the day, every time the word “day” appeared in this text, I noticed it and gave it emphasis. “Day” appears 36 times. Here are some of my favorite selections:
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems
Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders,
I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait
The boatmen and clam-diggers arose early and stopt for me,
I tuck’d my trowser-ends in my boots and went and had a good time;
You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle.
Have you heard that it was good to gain the day?
My knowledge my live parts, it keeping tally with the meaning of all things,
Happiness, (which whoever hears me let him or her set out in search of this day.)
Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
What a good question!
-
I woke up this day and Hannah was in the kitchen. She got the kettle boiling. We were talking about relationships. She said something like, it’s okay if you don’t fit perfectly like a puzzle piece with everyone. That image made me think of the puzzle as a whole, that we fit somewhere inside it. I was imagining the puzzle like a day. Puzzle du jour. All disorganized like soup in a bowl. Which made me think of something my friend Liel Green wrote: Our learned perception of time as a natural process that progresses in a forward leaning linear direction manages to conceal its very construction.
This summer I wrote:
If you find a poem that confuses you, and then live out a part of it, your life will be bigger and so will the poem.
I remember the day I wrote that. I was smelling the hyssop and feeling so excited about it.
If the day is a bowl of soup, maybe the year is a quart container of it. Yeah that’s right, a quart container of leftover soup, that you can choose to throw out or heat up. If you heat it, you can eat it and digest what happened. Yesterday’s soup tastes richer today. I love poetry ;)
painting by Hannah Rust
⭐️🩷🌀