Distilling | Lucinda Ziesing
To write a poem you must distill—the process of refining, condensing and purifying. Rita Dove, our first African American Poet Laureate, describes poetry as “language at its most distilled and most powerful.”
Recently, I had a conversation and spirits with my niece, a wine journalist, about producing cognac. It turns out producing a fine cognac is strangely akin to writing a fine poem. They both go through a necessary double distillation process to increase their purity, achieve an essential depth of flavor and a smoother texture. The cognac does this literally, while the poem metaphorically.
Cognac starts with the best raw white grapes grown in the Cognac region of France. It includes a delicious water source and then is double distilled. After the first distillation, the grapes become a clear running “eau du vie.” This is the base spirit used for cognac before steeping in oak for years and turning a tawny brown. The oak aging polishes the spirit, softens the rough edges and brings a smoother texture and complexity to the cognac.
The French use the word “terroir” to identify how the climate, soil and terrain of the land impacts the taste of a spirit. However, if you rinse too often the flavor and character is removed from the cognac. So too a poem.
I wrote the poem, “Perry Street,” as I was selling the apartment I owned in the West Village for 40 years. I dreaded the loss. I wrote to distill my four decades to their essence, so I could carry the place inside me. Here, even further distilled, are excerpts of “Perry Street.”
Perry Street
I am drawn
to the West Village
in the disquiet of my twenties.
To the leafy crooked streets
that don’t conform,
known by name not number.
Following desire lines
of Dylan, Eleanor, John and Yoko.
I leave my roommates uptown
looking for a room of my own.
In the back pages of a rental book, I find her.
A small one-bedroom on Perry.
With the skin of warm stone,
steps to an underground,
and stars in the garden at night.
I fold into her.
The whole brownstone of her.
Once owned by Margaret Mead
now divided into
two units per floor.
My bedroom’s a tiny barge
pushing out into the garden at night.
A glimmering passageway hidden
between Perry and Charles.
I fit just so
along a captain’s bed
behind white gauze curtains.
The window cracks open at my thigh.
No bars to stop the breeze.
My toes never touch.
They never burn
on the radiator
at the end of my bed.
When men spend the night
they complain that their feet get hot.
There weren’t too many
before the man who became my husband arrived.
He liked it there,
even with his feet on fire.
…
Upstairs, Peter’s cello is silent.
So too the flute of a distant neighbor
that plays all day long.
Everyone’s practicing to be someone.
…
She folds into me.
The whole lanterned barge of her
stretching from garden to street.
Traveling up arterial canals
returning down rivered veins
to be reoxygenated in my heart.
Circulating over four decades.
…
We only visit now.
I’m raising a family in Maine.
…
On the top shelf of my closet
a chorus line of stilettos
switched out for city sneakers.
The pet store on Bleecker,
where I bought my father a grey parrot
after my mother died,
traded for a cupcake shop.
The hang out, Patisseri Lanciani,
swapped for The Last Mile,
peddling e-bikes, scooters and boards.
Sam of Sam’s Deli
to the West Bank gone.
My cross-country skis,
that took me into the blizzard of 1978,
gone.
The towers gone.
My mother gone.
My father gone.
The closing
is on Friday the 13th.
Then she’ll be gone.
The sound of the bath
The click of the closet
The keys in the niche
by the front door
I am shutting.
Lucinda Ziesing is a writer, actor, painter and producer. She received an MFA in writing from Spalding University. As a mixed media artist, her Public Works paintings are in private and corporate collections. She taught on the Theatre Faculty of Sarah Lawrence College and has appeared in productions in New York, Los Angeles and Maine. She produces events that celebrate community.
