Second-Hand Risings

Found the ingredients to begin to shape my plum cake recipe. I am still deciding whether a chocolate cream cheese icing would be too much or just what the damsel plum ordered. Anyway, I completed my china pattern, a simple pattern I chose when I was only fifteen and attended a Greek wedding where the bride had registered for the reasonably-priced and kind of innocent pattern (a white rose on white background with the hint of blue shadow to its folds). It's a little fifteen year old me still, but I love that this late date from then I still like it and that it isn't the dumb 24 carat rimmed Lenox show-off china that so many other of the brides chose that year, primarily for the fact that it was the most expensive (and least interesting) of the patterns.

Thanksgiving is shaping up nicely, thanks to etsy, some thrifty runnings-around but little actual thrifting. That's the thing: I am taking a kind of mostly-haitus from thrifting, that delightful verb that makes a Friday afternoon into a treasure hunt. Because I am good at few things, and because I was trained by the best (Thanks Bear!) a professional antiques picker and my co-seller on an old ebay shop that made grad. school bearable and even at times, deeply elegant, I rarely go into a thrift store and don't score or as my friends Kyle & Russel used to say: "swoop!"

It's an urban treasure hunt says my friend, and he's right. That's why I'm not playing right now, it's back to that quiet (and the novel-writing I've been sneaking in b/w unpacking and holiday-planning). I am trying not to feel the rush of the find, trying not to feel "better" because a thing plugged up the lacunas-various that make me feel like I need to feel. And there is something to be said for leaving someone else space to have things that he likes and space to be filled-in with our shared-finds. There are only so many cutesie things or gorgeous scarves or dresses so pretty that I never wear them for fear I will ruin them, or dresses so numerous, I forget I have them until some wrong season or other, I move and find the summer dresses in the late fall or with my many summer moves: winter clothes that make me prespire just to look upon. I love the stories inside them, the fabrics that lay colors alongside one another in ways that seem fresh because they're not, new because they are so old.

Tulips

That
tulip set
by the window

in its vase
of dusk is like
aflame. You

cannot help
but say — no.
Because a

tulip caught in
that glass is
a flame —

and once you
have said it how
to return to

bloomed stem
or soft spike
of anther

where now
is fire? Words
burn — bridge

colours away
from colour — so
while one

tulip flares
we lay waste
to night and

glimpse
our reddened
names — the way

Anne
cannot bear to
end — or as you

take your leave
of Mario that
ah

so missed and
strange. And you
sputter so

fierce with it
that you say it
again —

that this gift of
tulip is un-
like any

other — which
fires my lips
with a glow

already half
subsiding as you
turn to gaze — to

look with a mind
on the very point
of opening.

2010 Mario Petrucci