Saffron

In celebration of National Poetry Month

Saffron

by Craig Arnold

The recipe is written in your voice:
Sauté the rice to the color of a pearl
in oil flavored with pepper, cinnamon bark,

bay leaf and cardamom, the small green kind.
Simmer until the spices have all floated
up to the top--if you want to, pick them out.

Just before it's done, stir in the saffron
crumbled and soaked in milk. Such frail red threads,
odd how they bleed so yellow, so contrary

to what a purple flower's genitals
should look like. It was in a dirt-poor dive
somewhere in Spain that I had my first taste

of paella--how anything could cost
so much, I couldn't bring myself to believe
until you brought me out into the fields,

the ragged sweeps of autumn crocuses.
Not like the ones I've seen breaking the frost,
clumps of three or four, with the forced cheer

of things made to wake up too early
--these were a paler purple, less audacious.
the harvesters were children, mostly girls,

working their way in no special pattern
from bloom to bloom. One of them let me plunge
my hand up to the wrist in what she'd gathered

--they felt like bird's tongues sticking to my skin,
spotted with pollen, limp, bruised and damp,
with no smell to speak of. That handful dried

would not have covered my fingernail, and that
from a whole acre. Maybe it ended up
in your kitchen, in one of the many dishes

you taught me how to make, and which we never
ate more than half of--our tongues couldn't absorb
that much, so dense and yet so delicate:

we'd dull the taste with smoke, knocking the ashes
into the champagne flutes you had shipped back
from Murano, on our way up to bed.

There can't be that much saffron in the world
--as if to think it passed through my hands twice
would make it all appear less of a waste,

that wild, endlessly nuanced fugue of flavor,
so much variety, so much to spend.
Later, at the end, when I asked you what

you wanted if it wasn't me, you smashed
the dark brown vial across the counter, swept
spice and glass into your hand and said

This is my gold standard, my one measure
of value, the smell of money burning
--anything more expensive would be illegal.

I couldn't even begin to afford your taste.
My fingers, stained gold with its dirty sting,
still look to me like those of a small brown hand

drifting across a field, spreading the petals,
the womb pinched out like an unsightly hair
a thousand times a thousand times over,

all for a fleeting pungency, a touch
of yellow, all to prove how much
attention you command.

Be sure to write a poem or two this month. The world needs more of them.