A Few Shots of Bitter An Essay by
Mike Harrell
E.A. Hanninen, 2011
~ 14 ~
“Who has never tasted what is bitter does not know what is sweet.” ~German proverb
Sometimes you pour the glass. Sometimes the glass is poured for you. Sometimes you take a tiny sip and let it pool on your tongue to be reminded of a counterpart to Sweet. Sometimes you shed Bitter in another voice, returning without Bitter to your own. I wasn’t thinking about Bitter when I wrote the poems published here in TCE, yet Bitter is in them in various forms. Bitter irony in the last words of General John Sedgwick, shot by a sniper just seconds after lightheartedly dismissing the threat of snipers, and thus forever footnoted. And in the voice of a cranky poet, ironically complaining, in a poem full of ‚moon,‛ about the propensity of the moon to appear in poems. Bitter frustration in the lot of the overlooked ‚extra,‛ whose talent no one ever seems to recognize. Bitter resignation in the life-addled loser, who is slowly seduced by the idea of simply sitting down. The glass is poured, and offered. But you don’t have to drink. It might be enough to simply hold the globe up to the light, to notice its particular color, its odor. It would be risky to drink too deeply, as Bitter is strong, even in small measure, and flavors everything it comes in contact with. Yet, maybe there’s something homeopathic in taking small sips of a bitter draft. In the way listening to the Blues mitigates loneliness, or sorrow. A shedding of bitterness by assuming bitterness in another voice; poison leaking out around the words . . . someone else’s words. ‚My baby left me.‛ A small, acrid sip.