Authors: Kevin Young
The Hungry Ear (9 page)
The thing you have to remember
about hot water cornbread
is to wait for the burning
so you know when to flip it, and then again
so you know when it's crusty and done.
Then eat it the way we did,
with our fingers,
our feet still tingling from dancing.
But remember that sometimes the burning
takes such a long time,
and in that time,
sometimes,
poems are born.
Mornings when sky is white as dried gristle
and the air's unhealthy, coast
smothered, and you gone
I could stay in bed
and be the woman who aches for no reason, each day
a small death of love, cold rage for dinner,
coffee and continental indifference
at dawn.
Or dream lazily a market dayâ
bins of fruit and celery, poultry strung up,
loops of garlic and peppers. I'd select one
yellow onion, fist-sized, test its sleek
hardness, haggle, and settle a fair price.
Yesterday, a long day measured by shovel
and mattock, a wrestle with rootsâ
calm and dizzy when I bent over to loosen my shoes
at the finishâI thought
if there were splendors,
what few there were, knowledge of them
in me like fire in flint
I would have them â¦
and now I'd say the onion,
I'd have that, too. The work it took,
the soup it flavors, the griefs
innocently it summons.
A woman travels to Brazil for plastic
surgery and a face-lift. She is sixty
and has the usual desire to stay pretty.
Once she is healed, she takes her new face
out on the streets of Rio. A young man
with a gun wants her money. Bang, she's dead.
The body is shipped back to New York,
but in the morgue there is a mix-up. The son
is sent for. He is told that his mother
is one of these ten different women.
Each has been shot. Such is modern life.
He studies them all but can't find her.
With her new face, she has become a stranger.
Maybe it's this one, maybe it's that one.
He looks at her breasts. Which ones nursed him?
He presses their heads to his cheek.
Which ones consoled him? He even tries
climbing into their laps to see which
feels most familiar but the coroner stops him.
Well, says the coroner, which is your mother?
They all are, says the young man, let me
take them as a package. The coroner hesitates,
then agrees. Actually, it solved a lot of problems.
The young man has the ten women shipped home,
then cremates them all together. You've seen
how some people have a little urn on the mantel?
This man has a huge silver garbage can.
In the spring, he drags the garbage can
out to the garden and begins working the teeth,
the ash, the bits of bone into the soil.
Then he plants tomatoes. His mother loved tomatoes.
They grow straight from seed, so fast and big
that the young man is amazed. He takes the first
ten into the kitchen. In their roundness,
he sees his mother's breasts. In their smoothness,
he finds the consoling touch of her hands.
Mother, mother, he cries, and flings himself
on the tomatoes. Forget about the knife, the fork,
the pinch of salt. Try to imagine the filial
starvation, think of his ravenous kisses.
For weeks I have waited
for a day without death
or doubt. Instead
the sky set afire
or the flood
filling my face.
A stubborn drain
nothing can fix.
Every day death.
Every morning death
& every night
& evening
And each hour
a kind of winterâ
all weather
is unkind. Too
hot, or cold
that creeps the bones.
Father, your face
a faith
I can no longer see.
Across the street
a dying, yet
still-standing tree.
So why not
make a soup
of what's left? Why
not boil & chop
something outside
the mindâlet us
welcome winter
for a few hours, even
in summer. Some
say Gumbo
starts with
filé
or with
roux
, begins
with flour & water
making sure
not to burn. I know Gumbo
starts with sorrowâ
with hands that cannot wait
but mustâwith stirring
& a slow boil
& things that cannot
be taught, like grace.
Done right,
Gumbo lasts for days.
Done right, it will feed
you & not let go.
Like grief
you can eat & eat
& still plenty
left. Food
of the saints,
Gumbo will outlast
even usâlike pity,
you will curse it
& still hope
for the wing
of chicken bobbed
up from below.
Like God
Gumbo is hard
to get right
& I don't bother
asking for it outside
my mother's house.
Like life, there's no one
way to do it,
& a hundred ways,
from here to Sunday,
to get it dead wrong.
Save all the songs.
I know none,
even this, that will
bring a father
back to his son.
Blood is thicker
than water under
any bridge
& Gumbo thicker
than that. It was
my father's mother
who taught mine how
to stir its dark mirrorâ
now it is me
who wishes to plumb
its secret
depths. Black
Angel, Madonna
of the Shadows,
Hail Mary strong
& dark as dirt,
Gumbo's scent fills
this house like silence
& tells me everything
has an afterlife, given
enough time & the right
touch. You need
okra, sausage, bones
of a bird, an entire
onion cut open
& wept over, stirring
cayenne in till the end
burns the throatâ
till we can amen
& pretend
such fiery
mercy is all we know.
in memoriam W.K
.
Crippled by years of pruning, the apple branch
bends toward me, and I pick
the wizened, fiery fruit you offered years
ago, as you were dying.
Years, it took, for the fact
of your simply not
answering to ripen
within me. Only now
as I sit, pregnant, marooned
in tall grass, cross-hatched
by October sunlight, with the
thunk
of apples falling, can I taste
your absence. Pale
green, acidic. A spurt
of saliva quickens the mouth.
From the lower field
float yelps and laughter
of children tussling among
hummocks. Their fathers grope
higher into the branches, hands
stretching to grasp
that flecked, streaked
russets and McIntosh. Those men
are woven into a basketwork of boughs
and I am heavy on the ground below
surrounded
by bruised fruit and a fermenting
glow that rises
as apple haze from the weeds.
You had no children.
But you gave
me a painting of apples
shrivelled and burning,
which I remember now
and again, so that I may
learn, as you did, how
passionately to die. In
time, in time. My child
stirring within me weighs me down.
You have come
to meet us through
the braided seasons, and I see
how, rusting and golden, already
we are following you.
August, goldenrod blowing. We walk
into the graveyard, to find
my grandfather's grave. Ten years ago
I came here last, bringing
marigolds from the round garden
outside the kitchen.
I didn't know you then.
We walk
among carved names that go with photographs
on top of the piano at the farm:
Keneston, Wells, Fowler, Batchelder, Buck.
We pause at the new grave
of Grace Fenton, my grandfather's
sister. Last summer
we called on her at the nursing home,
eighty-seven, and nodding
in a blue housedress. We cannot find my
grandfather's grave
Back at the house
where no one lives, we potter
and explore the back chamber
where everything comes to rest: spinning wheels,
pretty boxes, quilts,
bottles, books, albums of postcards.
Then with a flashlight we descend
frail steps to the root cellarâblack,
cobwebby, huge,
with dirt floors and fieldstone walls,
and above the walls, holding the hewn
sills of the house, enormous
granite foundation stones.
Past the empty bins
for squash, apples, carrots, and potatoes,
we discover the shelves for canning, a few
pale pints
of tomato left, andâwhat
is this?âsyrup, maple syrup
in a quart jar, syrup
my grandfather made twenty-five
years ago
for the last time.
I remember
coming to the farm in March
in sugaring time, as a small boy.
He carried the pails of sap, sixteen-quart
buckets, dangling from each end
of a wooden yoke
that lay across his shoulders, and emptied them
into a vat in the saphouse
where fire burned day and night
for a week.
Now the saphouse
tilts, nearly to the ground,
like someone exhausted
to the point of death, and next winter
when snow piles three feet thick
on the roofs of the cold farm,
the saphouse will shudder and slide
with the snow to the ground.
Today
we take my grandfather's last
quart of syrup
upstairs, holding it gingerly,
and we wash off twenty-five years
of dirt, and we pull
and pry the lid up, cutting the stiff,
dried rubber gasket, and dip our fingers
in, you and I both, and taste
the sweetness, you for the first time,
the sweetness preserved, of a dead man
in the kitchen he left
when his body slid
like anyone's into the ground.
“Fish oils,” my doctor snorted, “and oily fish
are actually good for you. What's actually wrong
for anyone your age are all those dishes
with thick sauce that we all pined for so long
as we were young and poor. Now we can afford
to order such things, just not to digest them;
we find what bills we've run up in the stored
plaque and fat cells of our next stress test.”
My own last test scored in the top 10 percent
of males in my age bracket. Which defies
all consequences or justiceâI've spent
years shackled to my desk, saved from all exercise.
My dentist, next: “Your teeth seem quite good
for someone your age, better than we'd expect
with so few checkups or cleanings. Teeth should
repay you with more grief for such neglectӉ
echoing how my mother always nagged,
“Brush a full 100 strokes,” and would jam
cod liver oil down our throats till we'd go gagging
off to flu-filled classrooms, crammed
with vegetables and vitamins. By now,
I've outlasted both parents whose plain food
and firm ordinance must have endowed
this heart's tough muscleâweak still in gratitude.
Crabapple holding in arms
what almost has
vanished,
selvage and leaf-lavish open.
Pumpkin seed in the hand,
lick the salt after.
What remains, after.
Bowl fill with woodpecker's shavings of cedar.
Door of the beak, release attic.
Voice remain fragrant.
Love hold the lungs again open.
By the bed, here.
By silence and whiteness,
by staying.
Carved scent of orange-oil, open.
By rise of the woodpecker's question,
of crabapple fruiting,
clasp now this room that is given.
Open with flood what is given,
once again fragrant and here.
The cousin from Maine, knowing
about her diverticulitis, let out the nuts,
so the cookies weren't entirely to my taste,
but they were good enough; yes, good enough.
Each time I emptied a drawer or shelf
I permitted myself to eat one.
I cleared the closet of silk caftans
that slipped easily from clattering hangers,
and from the bureau I took her nightgowns
and sweaters, financial documents
neatly cinctured in long gray envelopes,
and the hairnets and peppermints she'd tucked among
Lucite frames abounding with great-grandchildren,
solemn in their Christmas finery.
