Chocolate In Chaco
They’ve been drinking chocolate in
the canyons of the southwest. Chaco
is where the ritual would begin,
enhanced by peace-pipes of tobacco.
It used to give the Indians highs
in 600 BCE,
before they came to compromise
with coffee. Chocolate makes you free
of any hang-ups you have got,
and makes you want to plight your troth
to girls who drink it with you hot
with frenzied fervor for its froth.
It is the aphrodisiac
I always use when I am trying
to get a girl into the sack.
The greatest chocolate is for dying,
and it is comforting to know,
when giving it to your companion,
that it was used as quid pro quo
for sex, I think, in Chaco Canyon,
far more convenient than wine,
which is, of course, a diuretic,
and though they thought cocaine was fine,
they used it an anesthetic.
Champagne works best for me, but choc-
lates’ great as runner-up: though cocoa
is thought by some to be baroque,
the girls who like it are rococo.
Precisely what that means I do
not know, but does it really matter
if in this broadside for a brew
called chocolate I add silly patter?
Michael Haederle (Mystery of Ancient Pueblo Jars is Solved, ” NYT, February 4,2009) , writes about the identification by W. Jeffrey Hurst, a senior bioanalytical chemist for the Hershey Company, of chocolate in ceramic jars dating to 600 BCE, found in Chaco Canyon:
For years Patricia Crown puzzled over the cylindrical clay jars found in the ruins at Chaco Canyon, the great complex of multistory masonry dwellings set amid the arid mesas of northwestern New Mexico. They were utterly unlike other pots and pitchers she had seen. Some scholars believed that Chaco’s inhabitants, ancestors of the modern Pueblo people of the Southwest, had stretched skins across the cylinders and used them for drums, while others thought they held sacred objects. But the answer is simpler, though no less intriguing, Ms. Crown asserts in a paper published Tuesday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: the jars were used for drinking liquid chocolate. Her findings offer the first proof of chocolate use in North America north of the Mexican border. How did the ancient Pueblos come to have cacao beans in the desert, more than 1,200 miles from the nearest cacao trees? ...Dorie Reents-Budet, a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and a Smithsonian Institution research associate specializing in Mayan cylinder vases, said that a sophisticated Mesoamerican trade network extended to Chaco in the north and as far south as Ecuador and Colombia. The Mayan vessels, decorated with court scenes and hieroglyphics, were used to ceremonially consume chocolate at sumptuous feasts, Ms. Reents-Budet said. An expensive luxury, the cacao beans were fermented, roasted and ground up, then mixed with water and flavorings before being whipped into froth. It made sense to present the beverage in a special vessel, she said. “It’s as if you were having a dinner party and serving Champagne, ” said Ms. Reents-Budet. “You serve Champagne in really nice glasses.”
The final quatrain is a response to a comment by Linda: “Rhymes, but sense? ”
2/4/09
poem by Gershon Hepner
Added by Poetry Lover
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