100 Food poems

A dinner party, coffee, tea, Sandwich, or supper, all may be In their way pleasant. But to me Not one of these deserves the praise That welcomer of new-born days, A breakfast, merits; ever giving Cheerful notice we are living Another day refreshed by sleep, When its festival we keep. Now although I would not slight Those kindly words we use ‘Good night’, Yet parting words are words of sorrow, And may not vie with sweet ‘Good Morrow’, With which again our friends we greet, When in the breakfast-room we meet, At the social table round, Listening to the lively sound Of those notes which never tire, Of urn, or kettle on the fire. Sleepy Robert never hears Or urn, or kettle; he appears When all have finished, one by one Dropping off, and breakfast done. Yet has he too his own pleasure, His breakfast hour’s his hour of leisure; And, left alone, he reads or muses, Or else in idle mood he uses To sit and watch the venturous fly, Where the sugar’s piled high, Clambering o’er the lumps so white, Rocky cliffs of sweet delight.

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I’ve never seen the land of milk and honey, but at the Iowa State Fair I glimpsed a cow fashioned of butter. It lived behind a window in an icy room, beneath klieg lights. I filed past as one files past a casket at a wake. It was that sad: a butter cow without a butter calf. Nearby I spied a butter motorcycle, motorcycle- sized, a mechanical afterthought I thought the cow might have liked to ride. You don’t drive a motorcycle; you ride it. But not if you’re a butter cow, not if you’re a butter cow who’s seen, if not the land of milk and honey, the land of milk, and dwelled within it. It had a short life span, the butter cow. Before it died, I looked deep into its butter eyes. It saw my butter soul. I could have wept, or spread myself, for nobody, across dry toast.

Slowly and with persistence he eats away at the big steak, gobbles up the asparagus, its butter & salt & root taste, drinks at a glass of red wine, and carefully taking his time, mops up the gravy with bread— The top of the café filtre is copper, passively shines back, & between mouthfuls of steak, sips of wine, he remembers at intervals to with the flat of his hand the top removed, bang at the apparatus, create the suction that the water will fall through more quickly Across the tiles of the floor, the cat comes to the table  :  again. “I’ve already given you one piece of steak, what do you want from me now? Love?” He strokes her head, her rounded black pregnant head, her greedy front paws slip from his knee, the pearl of great price ignored  .  She’s bored, he bangs the filtre again, its top is copper passively shines back  . Food & wine nearly finished. He lifts the whole apparatus off the cup  .  Merciful God, will it never be done?                      Too cold already to add cream and sugar, he offers the last piece of steak with his fingers  . She accepts it with calm dignity, even delicacy  .  The coffee goes down at a gulp, it is black & lukewarm  .

the plates are broken after just one meal: plates that mimic lily pads or horseshoe crabs, swifts’ wings, golden koi, whirlpools, blowholes in rictus: all smashed against the table’s edge—

The Artichoke She bore only the heart, Worked at the stem with her Fingers, pulling it to her, And into her, like a cord. She would sustain him, Would cover his heart. The hairy needles And the bigger leaves, These she licked into shape, Tipping each with its point. He is the mud-flower, The thorny hugger. The Asparagus She sent packs of great beasts to pass Over him, trailing belly-fur and dust, Bending their nostrils to his frail spear. This was to toughen him. For what? Stupidly, like a squirrel, standing up, Looking here and there, looking to all sides, He is cut down and taken away. She can smell him steaming, his crowns Already tender, his spine giving in. Now he is threatening to wither terribly, And slip from the water altogether, And billow through the kitchen like prayer. The Cauliflower Her words clot in his head. He presses himself to remember And feels the skin peel back, The skull bleach, crack, fall away. All that's left of him is the brain, Its tissue knotting up to shade him, The pain of its light pulsing How to move, how to move. Herbs Before fog leaves the scrub-oak Or the grasses of the downland, Take dragonwort under the black alder, Take cockspur grass and henbane, The belladonna, the deadly nightshade. Free them as you would a spider's web, Singing over them: Out, little wen, Out, little wen. Sing this into the mouth of the woman. Corn I am the corn quail. What I do is quick. You will know only The muffled clucking, The scurry, the first Shiver of feathers And I will be up, I will be in your Head with no way out, Wings beating at the Air behind your eyes. Celery The hope with water is that it will conceal nothing, that a clearness will follow upon it like the clearness after much rain, or the clearness where the air reaches to the river and touches it, where the rain falls from the trees into the river. Bell Pepper To find enough rooms for the gathering The walls go on alone not waiting For corners but thinking of sleeves And how the wind fills them and the snow Fills them and how cold it is without Fires when there are not enough rooms. Potatoes It had been growing in her like vegetables. She was going into the ground where it could Do better, where she could have potatoes. They would be small and easily mistaken For stones. It would fall to her to Sort them out, persuade them to stay Close to her, comforting her, letting her Wear them on her body, in her hair, Helping her hold always very still.

The merest suggestion of mouth and I was ravenous—I filled the house with chocolate, chestnuts, strudel, blood sausage; I bathed in butter. A glimpse of tongue and I was undone, simply a hint of heavy cream and the wax came off in a greasy slab, there were no cauldrons large enough. I imagined his body drawn in sections, flank, ribs, and tenderloin, I rubbed the blade to sparks, my stove walls sweated, windows dripping. Afterwards the house was a shell. My tongue: scorched white. I had to staple my stomach down to the size of a lichee nut. Thimbleful of broth, thimbleful of gruel, the merest suggestion floods my mouth with memory so rich I practically drown.

Pale gold and crumbling with crust mottled dark, almost bronze, pieces of honeycomb lie on a plate. Flecked with the pale paper of hive, their hexagonal cells leak into the deepening pool of amber. On your lips, against palate, tooth and tongue, the viscous sugar squeezes from its chambers, sears sweetness into your throat until you chew pulp and wax from a blue city of bees. Between your teeth is the blown flower and the flower's seed. Passport pages stamped and turning. Death's officious hum. Both the candle and its anther of flame. Your own yellow hunger. Never say you can't take this world into your mouth.

Great Creator, why did you make the peanut? —GWC Arachis Hypogaea may have been smuggled to North America by slaves who hid seeds of survival in their hair. Despite your nakedness, the chains, the stench, if white men did not eat you, you might come to a cruel land where, tended by moonlight and exhaustion, your seed might grow to be your children's manna in the wilderness. Arachis Hypogaea, or goober, an annual preferring warmth and sun, is an attractive plant, resembling clover. It bears flowers of two distinct genders: the staminate, or “male,” yellow, pretty, and the inconspicuous pistillate “female.” When fertilized, the pistillate turns down and corkscrews six inches into the ground. Each corkscrew, called a “peg,” grows one to four peanuts in the soil near the mother plant; each shell two of her shots at infinity. From the laboratory of a slave emerged a varied, balanced diet for the poor, stock foods, ink, paints, cosmetics, medicines ... Promise and purpose, the Ancestors' dream. “The Peanut Man,” we say, and laugh at him.

In Breughel's great picture “Canal Street,” restaurant customers order roast swan instead of chicken, hurled salad instead of tossed salad, while shoppers spill through a maze of stalled trucks and scurry around the sidewalk stalls jammed with countless nameless things that housewives sidestep to surround a Japanese man in a broad-brim hat and painted silk tie as he demonstrates how one gadget can cut food 50 different ways and though they don't understand a word he says, they stand transfixed by his spiel amid the fumes and noise and loud fruitvendors dropping casual perfections of sun and rain into bags and sacks against a backdrop of silver towers and sea and fields vibrant with excess that giddy farmers hail by tossing animals, large animals, into the air to be carried away on the winds of exuberance to the four corners of the globe where the romping gods bear so many attributes they're a bundle of incongruities and no one takes them seriously not even their beaming angels who parachute drunkenly down to the shore distracting the dogs let loose on cormorants that ate so much they can't fly but not the boys in the rowboat who have caught a blowfish, tickled its belly until it's about to burst like a balloon before dropping it overboard to watch it blow itself backward to kingdom come, nor the other children who have stopped clamoring over the stranded whale's back to swim out underwater, under the swans, grab them by the legs and yank them down in a slow fury of bubbles and light and then sell them to the market near the restaurant in the foreground of Breughel's great picture “Canal Street.”