Stevens Zucchini

Zucchini, squash, cucumber, these must be picked every day. The daily vine. Tomatoes, okra,

green beans, peas, these must be picked every other day.

The vines they grow, bloom, fruit and then last about 3 or 4 weeks while producing fruit then

fade away (bugs, disease, loss of vital life energy). Every morning at sunrise I get to watch this

drama unfold when I go and pick. I try to have it timed so the next succession of plants start

producing when the first transition back to earth.

Wallace Stevens, one of my all time favorite poets, whose poems most times I struggle with, has

a wonderful poem that gets so close to my experience with these vines, their fruit and flow of

growth, blossoming, blooming, frutiting, fading.

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Call the roller of big cigars,

The muscular one, and bid him whip

In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

Let the wenches dawdle in such dress

As they are used to wear, and let the boys

Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.

Let be be finale of seem.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Ice-cream? What does ice-cream and zucchini have in common? What is going on here? Roller

of big cigars, muscular man whipping concupiscent ice cream (which turns to curds), wenchs

(medieval english origins), last months newspapers. Sounds like a noisy circus in the kitchen,

people moving, coming, going. Full of wonderful salacious and libidinous life.

The next stanza though:

Take from the dresser of deal,

Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet

On which she embroidered fantails once

And spread it so as to cover her face.

If her horny feet protrude, they come

To show how cold she is, and dumb.

Let the lamp affix its beam.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Here in another room is someone taking a sheet with embroidery from a cheap pine dresser to

cover the cold body of the woman whose craft was embroidery. (lots more could be said on this)

The light fixes its beam on this scene for us. And here also the only emperor is the emperor of

ice-cream.

Like almost all true poems, this one's meaning slides through the fingers when held. Like our

zucchini plants, life is transitory, ice cream melts fast, it is passing, temporal, highly pleasurable,

better pick it every morning at first light before summer is gone. All this permanence is moving,

passing. The pleasure of life is life, the lamp beam shows this as well as death, the

permanence which just is, asks us to look at this, right at this, to not look away. Here and gone,

the only permanence being the movement created in the passing. Focus on the movements of

one's life, here are the pleasures and like ice-cream, like the daily vine picking, only for the

moment. Each moment exists in two states at once - with the emperor of ice-cream involved in

both. For Stevens, life, “the superbly beautiful and moving things” gather and disperse

simultaneously, which, precisely, is what happens in any living landscape or in the disintegrating

moment when the zucchini plant fades. “Let be - be finale of seem (also seam - the seam of the

sheet that binds it all together) Okay I am told I better get back to picking.

-Bill