100 Food poems

I’ll choose for myself next time who I’ll reach out and take as mine, in the way I might stand at a fruit stall having decided to ignore the apples the mangoes and the kiwis but hold my hands above a pile of oranges as if to warm my skin before a fire. Not only have I chosen oranges, but I’ll also choose which orange — I’ll test a few for firmness scrape some rind off with my fingernail so that a citrus scent will linger there all day. I won’t be happy with the first one I pick but will try different ones until I know you. How will I know you? You’ll feel warm between my palms and I’ll cup you like a handful of holy water. A vision will come to me of your exotic land: the sun you swelled under the tree you grew from. A drift of white blossoms from the orange tree will settle in my hair and I’ll know. This is how I will choose you: by feeling you smelling you, by slipping you into my coat. Maybe then I’ll climb the hill, look down on the town we live in with sunlight on my face and a miniature sun burning a hole in my pocket. Thirsty, I’ll suck the juice from it. From you. When I walk away I’ll leave behind a trail of lamp-bright rind.

At five o’clock in the morning, I walked to work and passed the green ponds of Horizon Park where the last bluegill, caught on the low, slight bank, panted hard in the dark mud, crushed glass, sour bottle caps, whiskey, and the iron weight of heat and smog. This haze stared through eyes gray as the broken window panes on the cheap side of town, and when this haze held you and whispered in your ears its quiet tragedies, it stole your breath quick as time. This is where men gathered to sell peanuts, buckets of oranges, and roses, and they sat on the benches and watched the trucks drive by and disappear. What I want to say is simple: a man must do more than sell roses where the bums go and beg— he must keep something holy. He must breath the winds that rustle the orchards of the valley where the white almond blooms replenish with their soft scent. He must learn from the Appaloosa when she walks in from the fields and bows her head to a trough of water that reflects nothing but her eyes and the stars. Shoulder, fat, bone, and loose sheet metal banged out a day-long cacophony. Twenty-eight pounds of spice had to be mixed before the grinder was done. Mustard powder, paprika, salt, and chili powder boiled in my nose, in my eyes, and in the red throb of my hard nicked-up knuckles. By late morning the meat defrosted, and the boxes began their ooze. Pig parts became easy to recognize. Eighty pounds of guts, kidneys, and stomach fell across my chest each time a box ripped apart. We dared not stop the music of our work: the clack of a clean pine pallet, pink meat and white fat ground to a pulp, sweetened, stuffed, and crimped, the chorizo boxed, the boxes labeled, stacked, and wrapped. At lunch, I watched Guillermo hunker over the table and dig into his stew—carrots, potatoes, celery, oxtail, and gravy, made from chili peppers and fat, smoldering in a ceramic bowl. Guillermo took out a white cotton napkin and spread it evenly across his lap, picked up a piece of sourdough ripped from a loaf and soaked the bread in the stew for a long time . . . his own tired body taking back what the work took, and he ate. He sucked on chili peppers the color of blood and took another bite of the bread. He sucked out the beef from the eyes of the bones and gnawed on the soft marrow, and he drank hot coffee sweetened con canela. “Eloisa,” he said, “can cook,” and he touched the brown lace crocheted into the edge of his cotton napkin, rubbed his gut, wiped the table, and walked out to complete his work.

Like buying a ticket inland to barely understandable provinces with no language at all I bargain and pay for this warm planet tipping the scales of wrist and elbow spreading my fingers with its weight to read my life-line my heart-line my seams and mounds of fortune. I stare into the sun on smoggy evenings the throat of an old street oven that seems to expand as I anticipate its glow engulfing my solar system. I open my mouth and China fills it sliding into tartness forcing my lips to begin its name over and over then finger-painting my chin with the gel of ripeness. I swallow the pabulum of infancy the sweet mucilage of age. It makes me eat like a person alone who hasn’t loved for years. There seems to be no core the few black seeds hardly noticed in its one undifferentiated cell other tongue that makes mine lazy    the flavour . . . the flavour is . . . my hand moves like an incantation through an alley of blunt flames that can be eaten with a spoon. I gorge on a people’s staple fat Buddha   squat Amida repeat three times persimmon persimmon persimmon and go to heaven.

I love him so, this creature I do pray was treated kindly. I will pay as much as pig-lovers see fit to guarantee him that. As for his fat, I’d give up years yes years of my own life for such a gulpable semblable. (My life! Such as it is! This liberality of leaves! The world won’t need those seventeen more poems, after all, there being so few subjects to be treated. Three if by subject we mean anyone submitted to another’s will. Two if by subject we mean topic. One if by death we wind up meaning love. And none if a subject must entail the curlicue’s indulgence of itself.)

decreed my mother-in-law as my husband passed the platter of inward-turning soft-skulled Martian baby heads around the table, and they were O so shyly slyly jostling each other with their boiled- green sardonic gossip (what was the news they told?) when he sharply answered, “Mother, have you ever eaten an artichoke?” “No,” she said, majestic, “but I just know I don’t care for them, don’t care for them at all”— for truly, if they weren’t Martian they were at the least Italian from that land of “smelly cheese” she wouldn’t eat, that land of oily curves and stalks, unnerving pots of churning who knows what, and she, nice, Jewish, from the Bronx, had fattened on her Russian- Jewish mother’s kugel, kosher chicken, good rye bread .... Bearded, rosy, magisterial at forty-five, he laughed, kept plucking, kept on licking those narcissistic leaves, each with its razor point defending the plump, the tender secret at the center, each a greave or plate of edible armor, so she smiled too, in the flash of dispute, knowing he’d give her ice cream later, all she wanted, as the rich meal drew to an end with sweets dished out in the lamplit circle, to parents, children, grandma— the chocolate mint she craved, and rocky road he bought especially for her, whose knees were just beginning to crumble from arthritis, whose heart would pump more creakily each year, whose baby fat would sag and sorrow as her voice weakened, breathing failed until she too was gathered into the same blank center where her son at sixty bearded still, still laughing, magisterial (though pallid now) had just a year before inexplicably settled.

Here, among the market vegetables, this torpedo from the ocean depths, a missile that swam, now lying in front of me dead. Surrounded by the earth's green froth —these lettuces, bunches of carrots— only you lived through the sea's truth, survived the unknown, the unfathomable darkness, the depths of the sea, the great abyss, le grand abîme, only you: varnished black-pitched witness to that deepest night. Only you: dark bullet barreled from the depths, carrying only your one wound, but resurgent, always renewed, locked into the current, fins fletched like wings in the torrent, in the coursing of the underwater dark, like a grieving arrow, sea-javelin, a nerveless oiled harpoon. Dead in front of me, catafalqued king of my own ocean; once sappy as a sprung fir in the green turmoil, once seed to sea-quake, tidal wave, now simply dead remains; in the whole market yours was the only shape left with purpose or direction in this jumbled ruin of nature; you are a solitary man of war among these frail vegetables, your flanks and prow black and slippery as if you were still a well-oiled ship of the wind, the only true machine of the sea: unflawed, undefiled, navigating now the waters of death.

And what if I had simply passed you by, your false skins gathering light in a basket, those skins of unpolished copper, would you have lived more greatly? Now you are free of that metallic coating, a broken hull of parchment, the dried petals of a lily— those who have not loved you will not know differently. But you are green fading into yellow— how deceptive you have been. Once I played the cithara, fingers chafing against each note. Once I worked the loom, cast the shuttle through the warp. Once I scrubbed the tiles deep in the tub of Alejandro. Now I try to deciper you. Beyond the village, within a cloud of wild cacao and tamarind, they chant your tale, how you, most common of your kind, make the great warrior-men cry but a woman can unravel you.

(after Juan Luis Guerra) from Africa to a Caribbean hill de África a las lomas del Caribe to the smiling ruin of our cities a la feliz ruina de ciudades anoint the neural vessels we refill al matorral neural en donde vive until your acid muse drowns our pities tu agria musa que ahoga soledades return us to our tribe that grew dark beans devuélvenos al semillero isleño cut through the grease of our late-night omelets metaboliza la grasa nocturna and warm this empty diner by the club trae tu calor a nuestro desvelo where luckless lovers stare at tiny screens haz que el amante no muera de sueño and poets brew old socks into psalmlets tu borra es poema que embadurna while dreaming it rains coffee from above. y sombría tu alegría de cielo.

Oh, for a bowl of fat Canary, Rich Palermo, sparkling Sherry, Some nectar else, from Juno’s dairy; Oh, these draughts would make us merry! Oh, for a wench (I deal in faces, And in other daintier things); Tickled am I with her embraces, Fine dancing in such fairy rings. Oh, for a plump fat leg of mutton, Veal, lamb, capon, pig, and coney; None is happy but a glutton, None an ass but who wants money. Wines indeed and girls are good, But brave victuals feast the blood; For wenches, wine, and lusty cheer, Jove would leap down to surfeit here.

I butterflied Australian rack of lamb with shallots, garlic, parsley, butter, wine (some in the pan, some for the palate). Although the livestock loved in nursery rhyme avoided clumps of mint, it served my family nonetheless. I am no PETA zealot (leather jacket, handbag, wallet, shoes) but wonder if the deeds we do pursue us in the afterlife. Does the fleecy creature have a tenderable claim? My lambent mind considers our short lease on life, the oven hot. Am I to blame? Who gave thee such a tender voice? asked Blake. Myself am Hell. I watch the mutton bake.