“How familiar / it feels to feel strange”
Morningside Heights, July - William Matthews | Graci Etna Bianco 2014
The Poem
Morningside Heights, July - William Matthews
Haze. Three student violists boarding
a bus. A clatter of jackhammers.
Granular light. A film of sweat for primer
and the heat for a coat of paint.
A man and a woman on a bench:
she tells him he must be psychic,
for how else could he sense, even before she knew,
that she’d need to call it off? A bicyclist
fumes by with a coach’s whistle clamped
hard between his teeth, shrilling like a teakettle
on the boil. I never meant, she says.
But I thought, he replies. Two cabs almost
collide; someone yells fuck in Farsi.
I’m sorry, she says. The comforts
of loneliness fall in like a bad platoon.
The sky blurs—there’s a storm coming
up or down. A lank cat slinks liquidly
around a corner. How familiar
it feels to feel strange, hollower
than a bassoon. A rill of chill air
in the leaves. A car alarm. Hail.
The Beverage
Graci Etna Bianco 2014
This week, I bought a bottle of white wine called Etna Bianco. You, like me, may assume that this means this is a bottle of white wine grown on Mount Etna. You’re right! Congrats. This is a white blend of two grapes grown on Mount Etna, and there is supposed to be a specific percent of one of these grapes. Honestly, I do not remember the specifics, except both kinds of grape start with C. I am 14 months into a 15 month master’s program. Don’t ask my brain to retain any new information right now, please.
This specific bottle of this wine really got me, though. Whatever the soil on Etna has going on makes this a super-mineral white, almost salty. Almost briney. I loved it. There’s a hit of acid and citrus, too. I think the salt/acid/citrus combo is my favorite combo. Which is why I love a margarita and this wine and lemony salad dressing. I think I just figured my palate out.
(The subject line this week breaks the rule I set for myself of picking one single whole line. But it's so good, right? It's so good.)
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