a good reason to make a pie at 9 pm

as if i needed a reason for night pie.

today is my mama's birfday and i am certain she liked chocolate pie. not as much as a reese's peanut butter cup or an orange-soda-with-apple-pie combo, but enough. if i remember right, her recipe was for a chocolate silk pie. the one i'm trying tonight uses bittersweet chocolate and creme fraiche, so...a little different. still, with those ingredients, i don't see how it could be anything but a splendid celebration.

maybe after i will eat some potato chips and lie on the couch.
stupid trader joes (i mean that affectionately) still isn't stocking their frozen pie crust (apparently it's seasonal) so i am going to have to MAKE MY OWN. bleh. fortunately natalie had the foresight to supply me with crust-making essentials (such as the cutest little rolling pin cozy you have ever seen), and hence made this project possible. so natalie, part of the pie honor goes to you.

in honor of the birthday girl, here's a poem i started 3 years ago and just found in my scraps folder. it started as an exercise, modeled after a poem by gerald stern that was in the New Yorker (3 years ago), so you can blame the run-on structure on him. this is not one of those poems that you can expect to understand literally. sorry--i like those better too. also i can't seem to get the font all the same size.

anyway, i think it's time to let this one air out.

Ailanthus*

(after Gerald Stern)

She was bright light against the blue

deeper-by-the-hour sky and lit I guessed from

the inside like the silk of a certain spinning moth and we

spoke less than we shuddered together

stuck as we were in time between valleys, in the shelter

of trees turned shadow by the contrast of dust carrying light

and she explained or I understood these tiny torches to be death

chariots, mote-small and everywhere, and what she

wanted most of all, if it came to a reckoning,

was cover under the leaves of the tree of heaven

and to be less than dead or rather more, inside

that canopy of bright fruit with her old bruised and corruptible skin

for it was harm she missed now and the juices of

decay even more than pleasure but it was

only memory for she was far from this familiar to me

now and I forgot to say that

she had died and she wore a blue sequined cap

that I remembered her in, my favorite of them all,

with no wig against the white curved neck

and I forgot to say that I was her daughter

the way I sometimes forgot in life to call her Mom,

though she was always mythic, even then

and now a bright soft light crouched around her

as if to guard or contain that body, as if

sensible to perfection; and reverence

is what we talked about and bad words and mean

jokes we’d thought were funny and still did

for that matter, though she was tired, and although

she wore the cap she said it was only a last-minute

useless stab at cheer, nothing like she could have done

with the blood still in her when one whisper in church

could choke me with laugh-tears, but now she quoted Hetet

interviewed on the subject of trees (who found Ailanthus

fit for gods and dogs, a fine catalyst of copious stools, the bark

of which by chewing could overcome tapeworm,

dysentery, and sundry bowel complaints) at which point

I begged her to stop so I could breathe.

*also known as "the tree of heaven"

and now i really must sign off or there will be nothing but metaphorical pie making tonight.