"The Eggplant Epithalamion"
For Grace & David Griffin & for Iris Love
"Mostly you eat eggplant at least once a day," she explained. "A Turk won't marry a woman unless she can cook eggplant at least a hundred ways." Archaeologist Iris Love, speaking of the cuisine on digs in Turkey. The New York Times, February 4, 1971.
I.
There are more than a hundred Turkish poems
about eggplant.
I would like to give you all of them.
If you scoop out every seed,
you can read me backward
like an Arabic book.
Look.
2.
(Lament in Aubergine)
Oh aubergine,
egg-shaped
& as shiny as if freshly laid ---
you are a melancholy fruit.
Solanum Melongena.
Every animal is sad
after eggplant.
3.
(Byzantine Eggplant Fable)
Once upon a time on the coast of Turkey
there lived a woman who could cook eggplant 99 ways.
She could slice eggplant thin as paper.
She could write poems on it & batter-fry it.
She could bake eggplant & broil it.
She could even roll the seeds in banana-
flavored cigarette papers
& get her husband high on eggplant.
But he was not pleased.
He went to her father & demanded his bride-price back.
He said he'd been cheated.
He wanted back two goats, twelve chickens
& a camel as reparation.
His wife wept & wept.
Her father raved.
The next day she gave birth to an eggplant.
It was premature & green
& she had to sit on it for days
before it hatched.
"This is my hundreth eggplant recipe," she screamed.
"I hope you're satisfied!"
(Thank Allah that the eggplant was a boy.)
4.
(Love & the Eggplant)
On the warm coast of Turkey, Miss Love
eats eggplant
"at least once a day."
How fitting that love should eat eggplant,
that most aphrodiastic fruit.
Fruit of the womb
of Asia Minor,
reminiscent of eggs,
of Istanbul's deep purple nights
& trhe Byzantine eyes of Christ.
I remember the borders of egg & dart
fencing us off from the flowers & fruit
of antiquity.
I remmember the egg & tongue
probing the lost scrolls of love.
I remember the ancient faces
of Aphrodite
hidden by dust
in the labyrinth under
the British Museum
to be finally found by Miss Love
right there
near Great Russell Square.
I think of the hundreds of poems of the eggplant
& my friends who have fallen in love
over an eggplant,
who have opened the eggplant together
& swum in its seeds,
who have clung in the egg of the eggplant
& have rocked to sleep
in love's dark purple boat.
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