elizabeth alexander

” If you have extraordinary bread and extraordinary butter, it’s hard to beat bread and butter.” ~ Jacques Pepin

Ah, butter! Slather it on a slice of warm crusty bread, watch a pat slippy slide down a stack of fluffy pancakes, feel it grease the corners of your mouth as you bite into a cob of corn.

Rich, smooth, creamy yellow — butter kisses your toast and ensures you will rise and shine. Ninety-nine percent of my cookie batters start off with creaming softened butter with sugar, beating till it’s nice and fluffy and ready for vanilla and eggs. There simply is no substitute: butter always promises superior flavor.

Fresh-bread-brown-butter — (Click for No-Knead City Bread recipe with Brown Butter Spread via Always . . . Leave Room for Dessert!)

Elizabeth Alexander’s soul-nourishing poem, “Butter,” makes me think about my parents. My mother loves butter, but my father won’t touch it. If you dare offer her margarine, be prepared for a haughty, “I want real butter.”

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“The time will come when winter will ask you what you were doing all summer.”
~ Henry Clay

Yes, it’s true. I do not like summer.

It feels like the whole world is sleepwalking. Clocks forget to tick. Everybody is out of town, and it’s definitely not business as usual.

I like business as usual.

Especially in my pajamas.

Here’s the thing. I’m all for relaxing, de-stressing, and having a jolly good time. But something about summer spells L-A-Z-Y. And with lazy comes GUILT.

Shouldn’t I clean out the pantry?
Call the piano tuner?
Invite friends to dinner?
Revise my WIP?
Marinate the chicken?
Research publishers?
Catch up on personal correspondence?
Decide what to wear in case Bob Dylan stops by?

Well, no.

I’m way too lazy.

And, God help me, I’m starting to really like it.

BLUES
by Elizabeth Alexander

I am lazy, the laziest
girl in the world. I sleep during
the day when I want to, ’til
my face is creased and swollen,
’til my lips are dry and hot. I
eat as I please: cookies and milk
after lunch, butter and sour cream
on my baked potato, foods that
slothful people eat, that turn
yellow and opaque beneath the skin.
Sometimes come dinnertime Sunday
I am still in my nightgown, the one
with the lace trim listing because
I have not mended it. Many days
I do not exercise, only
consider it, then rub my curdy
belly and lie down. Even
my poems are lazy.