Dec 13
Inexplicably, today’s tea is Pumpkin Spice. No, we don’t know either. It’s definitely December, and it’s definitely barrelling inexorably towards Christmas, so you have to wonder what possessed them.
Full disclosure: We are the wrong person for this review. We hate pumpkin spice. We hate pumpkin, and we hate spice. We don’t like it in coffee, or in baking, not with a fox, not in a box, not on a train or in a plane…You get the idea.
Though having had a few mouthfuls – it’s not terrible .We haven’t spat anything into the sink, and we have done that on occasion. There’s a reason we always brew the Advent Calendar tea in our mug before we use a pot, unless like yesterday, we draw something we know we like.
There was a memorable year DavidsTea did a pumpkin spice chai, and it was dreadful. Murchies do one that’s respectable, but they have other black teas we would drink first. For some reason, as a herbal tea, the pumpkin spice sort of works. We know, we know. Really selling it over here. Don’t all rush to buy it.
Our working theory is that there’s less sugar in the herbal tea we’re trying. Or maybe the fact that it’s all spices and no tea base is balancing the orange horror of pumpkin better. Who knows. We won’t be adding it to any loaves for flavouring, but we might, just possibly, drink this again.
There’s no graceful segue here. If there are poems about the wonders of pumpkin spice, they probably live on the TTC, and look, the TTC poems are great. No, genuinely. A few of them we’ve read and would love to repost here. But we can’t, so in the meantime, have a sestina. You don’t see a heck of a lot of those because the rules are a special kind of hell. We had to write one once in high school. We had to write six different kinds of maniacally precise poem for this assignment, including at least one sonnet, and you know what? The sonnet was easier. The contrapuntal poem is easier, and you have to make that make sense in two different directions. We’ll find you one another evening and prove it. Until then, the sestina.
The Proposal
Laura Barkat
“Perhaps, let’s go to Delft, ”
he said, taking the silver tea caddy
gingerly off the shelf. It was Betjeman and Barton—
not the shelf, which was of rosewood,
but the caddy painted slight with numbers, avoirdupois,
the weight of tea I steep to pour in porcelain.
“Why should we?” I lifted porcelain.
Not the kind they make in Delft—
copied from the Chinese, high-resistance, unlike the measure avoirdupois
adopted through a confluence of words… Latin, French as the tea caddy
I opened for the promise, that petaled-rose would
spread its fragrance with Darjeeling; Betjeman and Barton
sell it so. I wonder if it’s Betjeman or Barton
who dreamed of almonds, grapes and peonies to drift in porcelain.
Who bare-suggested in a whisper that a hint of rose would
be a better choice than, let’s just say, a tulip, yellow, plucked from Delft?
I mused on Netherland’s canals and stretched towards the tea caddy.
What if he could weigh my thoughts in dark avoirdupois?
A measure partly from the Latin, avoirdupois
came over from to have, to hold, possess, like the Betjeman and Barton
I hold this very moment, twisting cover of a tight-sealed tea caddy
which, had it come from long ago, might rather be of bone-ash porcelain
hand-painted blue with scenes of domesticity from Delft.
Milk maids, windmills, a tulip— not a rose— would
play across it like the Madagascar sun on rosewood
stolen from the tropics, shipped through China, measured in avoirdupois—
all multiples of which are based on pounds, like stones of city walls in Delft.
You cannot find this in the catalog from Betjeman and Barton,
the knowledge that the British added stones as hard as fired porcelain,
or that the city once exploded like the fragrance from this silver tea caddy,
assaulting air and narrow streets with powder they don’t sell in tea caddies,
brass-mounted, inlaid carefully, satin-wood or rosewood,
the larger ones called tea chests, often seated near the porcelain
in dining rooms where merchandise bears not the paint of bold avoirdupois
but is quite fragrant with rare teas of fine purveyors. Betjeman and Barton
is my favorite, see, residing in the heart of passion—Paris—not in Delft.
I place the silver tea caddy directly on the shelf, unpainted with the weight of ebony avoirdupois,
silver tipped with fresh-spilled leaves scattered on the rosewood, lined with Betjeman and Barton
rarities to pour into my porcelain, which would, I tell him, never come from Delft.
