If There Were a Chile to Taste Like Sunshine

She bought the rugs in Peru
where aji amarillo hung
like citrine gems in the lobes of market stalls,

old women, shriveled peppers,
calling to the American girl
lank in slacks, the languor of such heat

dark in the roots of her hair.
She didn’t take a lover there,
but loved to listen to the longing

flutes and shadows, labored breath,
all moaning hills
and pentatonic hollows. Instead,

she learned to cook. Mortar and pestle ground
such spice into her dreams.
She slept with fennel and cumin

under her pillow, folded in her palms
like prayer. And now,
gone herself to ground,

her granddaughter hangs the market rugs,
that impulse of a warmer clime,
where sun will strike the drum

of her kitchen wall, where she will wash
and dance and bake and hum
a tune that no one taught her, but she knows
O so completely.

We all have remarkable stories about relatives that seem casual to us because they are so familiar, but when we share them in passing, others jolt awake at their sharp and poignant details. I was helping a friend hang rugs on a wall of her cabin when she told me about her grandmother who bought them while traveling alone in Peru as a young woman. I’ve used the boldness of the spices and the longing echo of the traditional Peruvian flutes to evoke a kind of sensuality, but not of foreign liaisons. Instead, the shared intimacies across generations of women speak to me here. Her grandmother is gone, so she’ll never see this cabin hung with her market purchases, but they form the backdrop for a life very like her own. The title comes from a snooty cooking magazine article on the Peruvian peppers, aji amarillo. I liked the introduction of such warmth into an Alaskan cabin in winter.