Poetry of Issue #7        Page 9

Great Pairings in the History of Pasta: The Tomato

To pasta secca, pasta fresca.
To the 300-plus types of pasta, more permutations
than there are of men.
To macaroni drying on sticks
over Naples cobblestones in the 19th century.
To the men I’ve loved even more than pasta,
secco and fresco.

To the tomato’s journey from Peru to Italy
just to take its place in a culinary noir of fruit
in which it was viewed as nightshade, poisonous.
How ungrateful the doctors
who denounced the tomato as unhealthy. This is not
an ode to those doctors.
To tomatoes and to men who love all things saucy.

To Parma, which has a tomato museum
and a recipe for a five-course meal
focused on the tomato.
To the baroque opera by Antonio Cesti, Il Pomo d’Oro,
libretto by Francesco Sbarra.
To hot tomato and the man who calls me that.
To Paganini’s early recipe for tomato sauce,
written down in between his fiddlings.

To simple pasta with simple sauce.
To complex pasta with complex sauce.
To a man who goes with me like pasta goes with tomatoes,
a heavenly pairing in which the best pasta and the best men
have ridges, something to grab.
To couplings that work—spicy and juicy.