Onions
How easily happiness begins by
dicing onions. A lump of sweet butter
slithers and swirls across the floor
of the saute 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, thought
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.
William Matthews
William Matthews published eleven books of poetry, including Time
& Money, 1996, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award,
and a book of essays entitled Curiosities, 1989. He served as
president of Associated Writing Programs and of the Poetry Society
of America and as a member and chair of the Literature Panel of
the National Endowment for the Arts. He received fellowships from
the Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill foundations, and he was
awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. He died of a heart attack on
November 12, 1997, the day after his fifty-fifth birthday.
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