Authors: Kevin Young
The Hungry Ear (10 page)
Finally the drawers were empty,
the bags full, and the largest cookie,
which I had saved for last, lay
solitary in the tin with a nimbus
of crumbs around it. There would be no more
parcels from Portland. I took it up
and sniffed it, and before eating it,
pressed it against my forehead, because
it seemed like the next thing to do.
Together in the pot
With our lives
Chopped like onions.
Let it rain, let it snow.
Dead people's wedding pictures
Make a hearty soup.
The soup of strays
Roaming the world
In search of their master.
The soup of orphans
Wiping their red noses
On the black armband on their sleeves.
The soup loved by flies.
On what shall we cook it?
On the mustache of Joseph Stalin.
The fires of Treblinka.
The fires of Hiroshima.
The head of the one about to be shot.
The head swarming with memories.
Let's cook it until we see in its steam
Our sweethearts' white bodies.
They are huge, they are voluptuous,
They are offering their breasts to us
As if we were suckling infants.
What do you think it will taste like?
Like spit on a pair of dice.
Like prison barbed wire.
Like white panties of Veronica Lake.
Like her toes painted red.
Like tallow on death's wheelbarrow.
At the end of an evil century,
We arouse the devil's curiosity
By spooning the soup of angels
Into our toothless mouths.
What shall we eat it with?
With an old shoe left in the rain.
With two eyes quarreling in the same head.
With a bent and rusty nail
And a trembling hand.
We'll sit slurping
With our hats on:
A soup like knives being sharpened.
A thick slaughterhouse soup.
And this is what we'll have on the side:
The bread of remembrance, a black bread.
Blood sausages of yes and no.
Scallions grown on our mothers' graves.
Black olives from our fathers' eyes.
The immigrant in the middle of the Atlantic,
Pissing in the sea with a sense of eternity.
The wine of that clear night,
A dark wine sparkling with stars.
They're off doing what they do
and it is pleasant to be here without them
taking up so much room.
They are safely among their own,
in front of their piles of meat, arguing
about cars and their generals,
and, of course, with the TV going all the while.
One reads that the digestive wind passed by cattle
is many times more destructive to the atmosphere
than all of the aerosol cans combined.
How does one measure such a thing?
The world has been coming to an end
for 5,000 years. If not tomorrow,
surely, one day very soon.
This is the easy time, there is nothing doing.
I have whirled the midwife's extractor,
I have my honey,
Six jars of it,
Six cat's eyes in the wine cellar,
Wintering in a dark without window
At the heart of the house
Next to the last tenant's rancid jam
And the bottles of empty glittersâ
Sir So-and-so's gin.
This is the room I have never been in.
This is the room I could never breathe in.
The black bunched in there like a bat,
No light
But the torch and its faint
Chinese yellow on appalling objectsâ
Black asininity. Decay.
Possession.
It is they who own me.
Neither cruel nor indifferent,
Only ignorant.
This is the time of hanging on for the beesâthe bees
So slow I hardly know them,
Filing like soldiers
To the syrup tin
To make up for the honey I've taken.
Tate and Lyle keeps them going,
The refined snow.
It is Tate and Lyle they live on, instead of flowers.
They take it. The cold sets in.
Now they ball in a mass,
Black
Mind against all that white.
The smile of the snow is white.
It spreads itself out, a mile-long body of Meissen,
Into which, on warm days,
They can only carry their dead.
The bees are all women,
Maids and the long royal lady.
They have got rid of the men,
The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors.
Winter is for womenâ
The woman, still at her knitting,
At the cradle of Spanish walnut,
Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.
Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas
Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year?
What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?
The bees are flying. They taste the spring.
Spring Rain
Nothing is so beautiful as spring
.
âGERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
Now what has all this to do with anything, well
anything always has something to do with something and
nothing is more interesting than that something that you eat
.
âGERTRUDE STEIN
American Food and American Houses
I wouldn't be here
without you. Without you
I'd be umpteen
pounds lighter & a lot
less alive. You stuck
round my ribs even
when I treated you like a dog
dirty, I dare not eat.
I know you're the blues
because loving you
may kill meâbut still you
rock me down slow
as hamhocks on the stove.
Anyway you come
fried, cued, burnt
to within one inch
of your life I love. Babe,
I revere your every
nicknameâbacon, chitlin,
crackling, sin.
Some call you murder,
shame's step-sisterâ
then dress you up
& declare you white
& healthy, but you always
come back, sauced, to me.
Adam himself gave up
a rib to see yours
piled pink beside him.
Your heaven is the only one
worth wantingâ
you keep me all night
cursing your four-
letter name, the next
begging for you again.
I'm fond, nereids and nymphs, unlike some, of the pig,
Of the tusker, the snout, the boar and the swine.
One way or another, all pigs have been mineâ
Under my thumb, the bristling, salty skin of their backs,
In my nostrils here, their yobby, porky colognes.
I'm familiar with hogs and runts, their percussion of oinks
At dusk, at the creaky gate of the sty,
Tasting the sweaty, spicy air, the moon
Like a lemon popped in the mouth of the sky.
But I want to begin with a recipe from abroad
which uses the cheekâand the tongue in cheek
at that. Lay two pig's cheeks, with the tongue,
in a dish, and strew it well over with salt
and cloves. Remember the skills of the tongueâ
to lick, to lap, to loosen, lubricate, to lie
in the soft pouch of the faceâand how each pig's face
was uniquely itself, as many handsome as plain,
the cowardly face, the brave, the comical, noble,
sly or wise, the cruel, the kind, but all of them,
nymphs, with those piggy eyes. Season with mace.
The chicken contributes,
But the pig gives his all.
Consumer groups have gone and taken
Some of the savor out of bacon.
Protein-per-penny in bacon, they say,
Equals needles-per-square-inch of hay.
Well, I know, after cooking all
That's left to eat is mighty small
           (You also get a lot of lossage
           In life, romance, and country sausage),
And I will vote for making it cheaper,
Wider, longer, leaner, deeper,
But let's not throw the baby, please,
Out with the (visual rhyme here) grease.
There's nothing crumbles like bacon still,
And I don't think there ever will
Be anything, whate'er you use
For meat, that chews like bacon chews.
And also: I wish these groups would tell
Me whether they counted in the smell.
The smell of it cooking's worth $2.10 a pound.
And how bout the
sound
?
