Chicken Soup for the Unsoul

woman butchering a half-frozen chicken


this pome accompanies a photograph still
in the negative, still lounging in the
wet paper bath all photos must undergo.

for thirty-six hours it sat outside the
freezer in the fridge it sat cold, still
frozen as it thawed to renewed hardness.

every crack it speaks ice fractured bone
rips the teletype din of her olding son
tapping out half-moons of celery & carrot

a vat of boiling water would bleed of
color, vapor and slowly rot out the slow
perfection of their halfly round shapes.

a photo accompanies this too et cetera

it freezes the vapor or will et cetera

everything comes into focus and out in
the steam that radiates, cools, waters
the hollow dome of the massive vat's lid.

while apple-tasting pie awaits in packages
of frozen dough, thawing berries, fresh
stalks of rhubarb growing out of control.

an appletasting of pie, because it does
not taste of apples: it represents what
thing it only fails to represent at all.

these things: pies, soups, photoned graphs,
and the several states of water (some three)
are all lost in the moment we find them.

for water is dense when it flows et cetera

& meaning is lost when it knows et cetera


For those of you who care about silly things like biography, this poem has its origins in a Saturday my mother and I spent preparing a chicken (this one "fresh" not frozen) for an early evening meal of chicken and noodle soup. I play sous chef in my mother's kitchen (and honestly that's the best anyone can hope for), so I am there, as much as I often am not, in this poem in the form of the olding son cutting up carrots and stalks of celery. Both of us are incidental, of course; butchering, cleaning, cooking, and dismantling a chicken is not the point. An initial draft of the above was typed on an old portable typewriter, a Smith Corona Silent if you must know, but maybe that isn't relevant either.

I was given a camera over the weekend, a redesign by Promaster of a standard Canon SLR body from the 80s. I wanted it 1) because I have a secret and weird love of photography and 2) because it's fully manual aside from the light reader. In other words, it is capable of taking photographs completely absent electricity. My affinity for this camera seems (tangentially) related in my mind to a conversation I was having with the savage last night: we were discussing the effects of living in the abject pollution of early 20th century Chicago on the poet's "voice," both figurative and literal. I, and most classical poetic theorists of all racial categories, tend to valorize the aesthetic possibilities of constraints, yet there is also something much more sinister at play. That more sinister side points to something I often don't consider: part of any poetic effect is what is held back, left unsaid, whatever, despite the poet's intention to do so. The poet struggles against the constraint but inevitably the constraint compels her not to say, not to do. And in so (not) doing, there is created in the poet's "voice" a kind of real genius of which she would otherwise not be capable. The irony, though, is in this process that "voice" becomes something wholly alien to her.