Onions
by William Matthews
(published in his Selected Poems and Translations, 1969-1991, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992)
How easily happiness begins by
dicing onions. A lump of sweet butter
slithers and swirls across the floor
of the sauté pan, especially if its
errant path crosses a tiny slick
of olive oil. Then a tumble of onions.
This could mean soup or risotto
or chutney (from the Sanskrit
chatni, to lick). Slowly the onions
go limp and then nacreous
and then what cookbooks call clear,
though if they were eyes you could see
clearly the cataracts in them.
It’s true it can make you weep
to peel them, to unfurl and to tease
from the taut ball first the brittle,
caramel-colored and decrepit
papery outside layer, the least
recent the reticent onion
wrapped around its growing body,
for there’s nothing to an onion
but skin, and it’s true you can go on
weeping as you go on in, through
the moist middle skins, the sweetest
and thickest, and you can go on
in to the core, to the bud-like,
acrid, fibrous skins densely
clustered there, stalky and in-
complete, and these are the most
pungent, like the nuggets of nightmare
and rage and murmury animal
comfort that infant humans secrete.
This is the best domestic perfume.
You sit down to eat with a rumor
of onions still on your twice-washed
hands and lift to your mouth a hint
of a story about loam and usual
endurance. It’s there when you clean up
and rinse the wine glasses and make
a joke, and you leave the minutest
whiff of it on the light switch,
later, when you climb the stairs.
I need to first admit that I am not a great fan of onions (unless they are pulverized and undetectable) and chopping them makes me cry, a stinging that is painful.
But I do love this poem!
That first line tells us that, like many food poems, this one will have ode-like qualities. Then lots of "s" words, which add to the sizzle and scent Matthews is creating.
But that third stanza! Sure, stanza 2 gave us "nacreous" (when was the last time you read that word in a poem? or anywhere?), but stanza 3 provides "cataracts," along with verbs and images that put us there in that kitchen.
The great description continues in the next stanza. Stanza 4 brings us a "murmury animal" in this incredible sensory detail: "like the nuggets of nightmare/and rage and murmury animal/
comfort that infant humans secrete."
(Every so often I read a title, a line, a stanza, a poem, etc. that I wish I had in me to write. The above quotation is one of those. I am not a tattoo person, but maybe on a tee shirt?)
And right after that comes a volta ("turn" in poetry, usually in sonnets, but good to use when speaking of poetry). "Domestic perfume." Ah, we are in a house. We have washed our hands and then we eat. And in that last stanza ("domestic" has hinted, but now we are sure) there is a couple--partners? Parent and child? Friends? It doesn't really matter, though I guess spouses because of "domestic."
A joke, cleaning up, wine glasses, and then a small essence of the onion/the dinner (an act of love) is left behind, to linger.
Great poems take the ordinary and make it fascinating or take the strange and make it relatable. This poem turns dinner into a deeply meaningful event. Nothing extraordinary has happened in the poem; it is the way the poet sees, experiences, and then describes the meal.
A murmury animal, indeed!
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