Hi Maia Maia,
There are many aspects of this poem that I enjoy and appreciate. Let me mention just a few.
First, your setting up of the context in the first two lines is masterful. “Hands of the dead here in my living hands/ as I split stony squash with a crack of the blade…” Setting the poem at the exchange point between the living and the dead prompts me to read the whole of the rest of the piece in a different light. The first line is both physical and metaphysical, concrete and abstract. You then immediately plunge the reader into the sensuous reverie that characterizes much of the rest of the poem—“as I split the stony squash with a crack of the blade.” In many traditions, sound—the ringing of a bell, the shaking of a rattle, the pounding of a staff, the beating of a drum, the intoning of a chant—is a key element in the initiation of a ritual. The “crack” of the blade serves this purpose as well, announcing both the beginning of the preparation of a meal and extending an invitation to those not physically present but yet somehow—possibly—willing and able to participate in the act. To the dead: “Your attention, please!”
Second, your use of alliteration and onomatopoeia are unusually vivid—“scoop seeds, oil flesh for the fire”; “sliding squash into fiery oven”; “testing impatiently for tenderness”: “the voluptuous swallow whetting lust for another.” Your use of these devices leaps beyond simple description to an almost hallucinatory effect, in which we are not so much perceiving the objects that we see and hear and touch as we taking note of their full independent existence; the objects seem to be actively reaching out to us in an attempt to shift the balance of the subject/object divide.
And third, the couplet has become a widely popular form for perhaps the first time since the 18th Century. It does serve as a convenient device for the ordering of one’s thoughts and for the creation of a poem that looks clean and orderly and balanced on the page, even when there is nothing especially rigorous going on. In “Consuelos de Cochina,” however, I feel that you do use the form to great effect. The progression of the poem down the page is very much a kind of dance, and you create genuine grammatical tension with your line breaks—“as I split stony squash with a crack of the blade,/ scoop seeds”; “hands/ of women and men in my hands”; “the old pleasure/ of sliding squash into fiery oven”; “irradiating/ bones of the face and chest as this fruity vegetable/ deity becomes human flesh…” With each line break, I may or may not be able to guess where you are going next; I nonetheless nod with satisfaction to see and hear just how you get there.
I look forward to reading more of your work.