Authors: Kevin Young
The Hungry Ear (13 page)
Picking grapes alone in the late autumn sunâ
A short, curved knife in my hand,
Its blade silver from so many sharpenings,
Its handle black.
I still have a scar where a friend
Sliced open my right index finger, once,
In a cutting shedâ
The same kind of knife.
The grapes drop into the pan,
And the gnats swarm over them, as always.
Fifteen years ago,
I worked this row of vines beside a dozen
Families up from Mexico.
No one spoke English, or wanted to.
One woman, who made an omelet with a sheet of tin
And five, light blue quail eggs,
Had a voice full of dusk, and jail cells,
And bird calls. She spoke,
In Spanish, to no one, as they all did.
Their swearing was specific,
And polite.
I remember two of them clearly:
A man named Tea, six feet, nine inches tall
At the age of sixty-two,
Who wore white spats into downtown Fresno
Each Saturday night,
An alcoholic giant whom the women lovedâ
One chilled morning, they found him dead outside
The Rose Café â¦
And Angel DomÃnguez,
Who came to work for my grandfather in 1910,
And who saved for years to buy
Twenty acres of rotting, Thompson Seedless vines.
While the sun flared all one August,
He decided he was dying of a rare disease,
And spent his money and his last years
On specialists,
Who found nothing wrong.
Tea laughed, and, tipping back
A bottle of Muscatel, said: “Nothing's wrong.
You're just dying.”
At seventeen, I discovered
Parlier, California, with its sad, topless bar,
And its one main street, and its opium.
I would stand still, and chalk my cue stick
In Johnny Palores' East Front Pool Hall, and watch
The room filling with tobacco smoke, as the sun set
Through one window.
Now all I hear are the vines rustling as I go
From one to the next,
The long canes holding up dry leaves, reddening,
So late in the year.
What the vines want must be this silence spreading
Over each town, over the dance halls and the dying parks,
And the police drowsing in their cruisers
Under the stars.
What the men who worked here wanted was
A drink strong enough
To let out what laughter they had.
I can still see the two of them:
Tea smiles and lets his yellow teeth shineâ
While Angel, the serious one, for whom
Death was a rare disease,
Purses his lips, and looks down, as if
He is already mourning himselfâ
A soft, gray hat between his hands.
Today, in honor of them,
I press my thumb against the flat part of this blade,
And steady a bunch of red, Málaga grapes
With one hand,
The way they showed me, and cutâ
And close my eyes to hear them laugh at me again,
And then, hearing nothing, no one,
Carry the grapes up to the solemn house,
Where I was born.
Then through an opening in the sky we were shown al! the countries of the earth, and the camping grounds of our fathers since the beginning. All was thereâthe tipis, the ghosts of our fathers, andgreat herds of buffalo, and a country that smiled because it was rich and the white man was not there
.
âMATO ANAHTAKA
The Redskins are winning
and I'm on the couch waiting for
the second half of their grunt-tussle
against the Chiefs to begin.
By ancient Indian habit,
I dash to the fridge for more suds.
For five years running now,
it's been this sad, nonalcohol beer
for me and my liver.
As usual, I read the health warning
before I drink the ersatz brew.
On the bottle's label, it says:
My brother, you are pouring
this illusion down your throat
because you are an alcoholic child
of alcoholic parents and they
were the alcoholic children
of your alcoholic grandparents.
My brother, oh, my brother
before your grandparents,
your great-grandparents
lived without firewater,
without the ghost of electricity,
without the white man's God
in bow and arrow old-time days.
Days of obsidian. Days of grace.
Days of buckskin. Days of grace.
Days of the war lance and the buffalo.
Days before your people learned
how to hotwire
the Great Spirit
with chemical prayers
.
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
The amount of salt and pepper you want to use is your business. I don't
like to get in people's business. I have made everything in here and found
everything to be everything and everything came out very together
.
âVERTAMAE SMART-GROSVENOR,
Vibration Cooking
In the salt mines
I saw the salt
in this shaker.
I know you won't believe me,
but there
it sings,
the salt sings, the skin
of the salt mines
sings
with a mouth choking
on dirt.
Alone
when I heard
the voice
of salt,
I trembled
in the empty
desert.
Near Antofagasta
the whole
salted plain
shouts out
in its
cracked
voice
a pitiful
song.
Then in its caverns
jewels of rock salt, a mountain
of light buried under earth,
transparent cathedral,
crystal of the sea, oblivion
of the waves.
And now on each table
of the world
your agile
essence,
salt,
spreading
a vital luster
on
our food.
Preserver
of the ancient
stores in the holds
of ships, you were
the explorer
of the seas,
matter
foretold
in the secret, half-open
trails of foam.
Dust of water, the tongue
receives through you a kiss
from the marine night:
taste melds
your oceanity
into each rich morsel
and thus the least
wave
of the saltshaker
teaches us
not merely domestic purity
but also the essential flavor of the infinite.
Translated by Philip Levine
Onion,
luminous flask,
your beauty formed
petal by petal,
crystal scales expanded you
and in the secrecy of the dark earth
your belly grew round with dew.
Under the earth
the miracle
happened
and when your clumsy
green stem appeared,
and your leaves were born
like swords
in the garden,
the earth heaped up her power
showing your naked transparency,
and as the remote sea
in lifting the breasts of Aphrodite
duplicating the magnolia,
so did the earth
make you,
onion
clear as a planet
and destined
to shine,
constant constellation,
round rose of water,
upon
the table
of the poor.
Generously
you undo
your globe of freshness
in the fervent consummation
of the cooking pot,
and the crystal shred
in the flaming heat of the oil
is transformed into a curled golden feather.
Then, too, I will recall how fertile
is your influence on the love of the salad,
and it seems that the sky contributes
by giving you the shape of hailstones
to celebrate your chopped brightness
on the hemispheres of a tomato.
But within reach
of the hands of the common people,
sprinkled with oil,
dusted
with a bit of salt,
you kill the hunger
of the day-laborer on his hard path.
Star of the poor,
fairy godmother
wrapped
in delicate
paper, you rise from the ground
eternal, whole, pure
like an astral seed,
and when the kitchen knife
cuts you, there arises
the only tear
without sorrow.
You make us cry without hurting us.
I have praised everything that exists,
but to me, onion, you are
more beautiful than a bird
of dazzling feathers,
heavenly globe, platinum goblet,
unmoving dance
of the snowy anemone
and the fragrance of the earth lives
in your crystalline nature.
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
Up from the depths
of the raised bed of earth
the stalks lift thin banners,
green in the wind.
The roots clasp the soil,
with the reluctance of lovers
letting go. But the earth
breaks open, warm as biscuits,
and the pale bulbs, crusted
with earth crumbs, enter
for the first time
air. Braided, on green pigtails
lashed to the chickenwire gate
of the garden, each bulb
dries to a rustle
weeks later, in my palmâ
husky skins fine as rice paper,
veined like the leaf of a lily,
faintly varnished with gold.
Brittle papers that flake
when a thumb pries into
the cluster of cloves, prying
in and in, pinching the flesh
of a clove up under a nailâ
and the odor! redolent,
a pungency in which pot roasts
and thick stews gather,
an aroma for eggplants and sesame
melding in a rich mystic kiss,
pure baba ganoush.
Let the feckless take it
odorless in capsulesâ
I simmer it in wine and tomatoes,
blend it with butter and basil,
lash the curved cloves
to a necklace I wear on my skin,
cold wolf-moon nights in the woods.
I stuff pillows with the skins,
rub the salad bowl of the lover's
body nightly with garlic,
breathe it out with the love cry,
let it rise, a nebula
into starry night skies â¦
for what if Dante were wrong
about paradise, the choirs
in their circular rowsâwhat if
the celestial rose weren't petals
at all, but a commoner light,
a corona of cloves in their thin
garlic gowns, twisting up
into wicks that long to be lit,
and they are lit, flaming up
in the glory of Godâ
the God of the old myths
who leans over the fence
of the firmament, beyond pale
buds of new stars, leaning
our way, toward our own
common sod, sighing into it,
raising it, his breath
faintly garlic.
The doctor says it's better for my spine
this wayâmore fat, more estrogen.
Well, then! There was a time when a wife's
plump shoulders signified prosperity.
These days my fashionable friends
get by on seaweed milkshakes,
Pall Malls, and vitamin pills. Their clothes
hang elegantly from their clavicles.
As the evening news makes clear
the starving and the besieged maintain
the current standard of beauty without effort.
Whenever two or three gather together
the talk turns dreamily to sausages,
purple cabbages, black beans and rice,
noodles gleaming with cream, yams, and plums,
and chapati fried in ghee.
It's not enough to say a briny air
coasts off the gorge, that my downstairs neighbour
is basting a crisp-coated broiler,
that garlic and cardamom ghost on my hands
from the weekend's wondrous kormaâ
at times the craving is narrowed down,
shaved to a pill, hunted across fields to a den
where it surrenders and reveals itself
as chicken in soy sauce from that takeaway
long since demolished; the unlikely delicacy
of tinned risotto bubbled in its can;
sweet deep-fried sausages from a chip shop
on the back roads of Fife circa '71;
My eyes gloom up with lust, my mouth is rife,
the belly keening. The best of us mourn the loss
of such salt tongue blessings, part savour
and part pity, which we will not taste again:
musky pakora sauce subliming on my wrists
as I drifted home across The Meadows;
a lentil soup so true I knelt and wept.
The first night of my second voyage to Wales,
tired as rag from ascending the left cheek of Earth,
I nevertheless went to Merthyr in good company
and warm in neckclothing and speech in the Butcher's Arms
till Time struck us pintless, and Eddie Rees steamed in brick lanes
and under the dark of the White Tip we repaired shouting
to I think the Bengal. I called for curry, the hottest,
vain of my nation, proud of my hard mouth from childhood,
the kindly brown waiter wringing the hands of dissuasion
O vindaloo, sir! You sure you want vindaloo, sir?
But I cried Yes please, being too far in to go back,
the bright bells of Rhymney moreover sang in my brains.
Fair play, it was frightful. I spooned the chicken of Hell
in a sauce of rich yellow brimstone. The valley boys with me
tasting it, croaked to white Jesus. And only pride drove me,
forkful by forkful, observed by hot mangosteen eyes,
by all the carnivorous castes and gurus from Cardiff
my brilliant tears washing the unbelief of the Welsh.
