The Hungry Ear (11 page)
Authors: Kevin Young
My brother sent me ribs for my birthday.
He sent me two six-pound, heavily scented,
slow-smoked slabs, Federal Express,
in a customized cardboard box, no bigger
than a baby coffin or a bulrush ark.
Swaddled tight in sheaves of foam and dry ice,
those ribs rested in the hold of some jetliner
and were carried high, over the Yellowhammer State
and the Magnolia State and the Brown Thrasher State,
over Kentucky coffeetrees and Sitka spruce
and live oak and wild oak and lowland plains
and deep-water harbors, over catfish farms
and single-crib barns and Holiness sects
and strip malls and mill towns and lumber
towns and coal camps and chemical plants,
to my table on this island on a cold night
with no moon where I eat those ribs and am made
full from what must have been a young animal,
small-boned and tender, having just
the right ratio of meat to fat.
Tonight outside, men and women enrobed
in blankets fare forth from shipping crates.
A bloodhound lunges against its choke
to sniff the corpse of a big rat and heaps
of drippings and grounds that steam
outside the diner as an ashen woman deep
in a doorway presses a finger to her lips.
A matted teddy bear impaled on a spike
looms over a vacant lot where a line of men
wreathe in fellowship around a blazing garbage can.
Tonight in a dream they gather
all night to labor over the unadorned
beds they have dug into the ground and filled
with the hardwood coals that glow like remote stars.
Their faces molten and ignited in the damp,
they know to turn the meat infrequently,
they know to keep the flame slow and the fire
cool. From a vat of spirits subacid and brackish,
they know to baste only occasionally. So that
by sunrise vapor will continue to collect, as usual,
forming, as it should, three types of clouds,
that the rainfall from the clouds, it is certain,
will not exceed the capacity of the river,
that the river will still flow, as always,
sweet brother, on course.
for Alvester James
Long after it was
necessary, Uncle
Vess ate the leavings
off the hog, doused
them with vinegar sauce.
He ate chewy abominations.
Then came high pressure.
Then came the little pills.
Then came the doctor
who stole Vess's second
sight, the predication
of pig's blood every
fourth Sunday.
Then came the stillness
of barn earth, no more
trembling at his step.
Then came the end
of the rib, but before
his eyes clouded,
Uncle Vess wrote
down the gospel
of barbecue.
Chapter one
:
Somebody got to die
with something at some
time or another.
Chapter two
:
Don't ever trust
white folk to cook
your meat until
it's done to the bone.
Chapter three
:
December is the best
time for hog killing.
The meat won't
spoil as quick.
Screams and blood
freeze over before
they hit the air.
Chapter four, Verse one
:
Great Grandma Mandy
used to say food
you was whipped
for tasted the best.
Chapter four, Verse two
:
Old Master knew to lock
the ham bacon chops
away quick or the slaves
would rob him blind.
He knew a padlock
to the smokehouse
was best to prevent
stealing, but even the
sorriest of slaves would
risk a beating for a full
belly. So Christmas time
he give his nasty
leftovers to the well
behaved. The head ears
snout tail fatback
chitlins feet ribs balls.
He thought gratitude
made a good seasoning.
Chapter five
:
Unclean means dirty
means filthy means
underwear worn too
long in summertime heat.
Perfectly good food
can't be no sin.
Maybe the little
bit of meat on ribs
makes for lean eating.
Maybe the pink flesh
is tasteless until you add
onions garlic black
pepper tomatoes
soured apple cider
but survival ain't never been
no crime against nature
or Maker. See, stay alive
in the meantime, laugh
a little harder. Go on
and gnaw that bone clean.
Saint Anthony, patron of sausage makers,
guide my pen and unkink my tongue. Of swine
I sing, and of those who tend and slaughter them,
of slops and wallows and fodder, of piglets
doddering on their stilty legs, and sows
splayed to offer burgeoned teats to sucklers,
and the four to five tons of manure
a pig (that ambling buffet) reinvests
in the soil each year; of truffle dowsers
and crunchers of chestnuts and acorns I sing.
In medieval Naples, each household
kept a pig on a twenty-four-foot tether,
rope enough that the hooved Hoover could
scour the domain, whereas in Rome
pigs foraged the streets haunted today by
rat-thin cats, tendons with fur. In Paris
in those years the
langueyers
, the “tonguers,”
or meat inspectors, lifted a pig's tongue
to look for white ulcers, since the comely
pig in spoiled condition could poison
a family. Indeed the Buddha died
from eating spoiled pork, vegetarians
I know like to insist, raising the stakes
from wrong to fatal, gleefully. Perhaps
you've read the bumper sticker too:
A Heart
Attack Is God's Revenge for Eating His
Little Friends
. Two major religions
prohibit eating pork. Both creeds were forged
in deserts, and the site-specific pig,
who detests dry mud, has never mixed well
with nomads or vice versa. Since a pig
eats everything, just as the cuisines that
sanctify the pig discard no fragment
of it, it makes sense to eat it whole hog
or shun it altogether, since to eat
or not to eat is sacral, if there's a choice
in the matter. To fast is not to starve.
The thirteen ravenous, sea-queasy pigs
Hernando de Soto loosed near Tampa
in 1542 ate whatever
they liked. How glad they must have been to hoove
some soil after skidding in the slick hold
week after dark week: a pig without sun
on its sullied back grows skittish and glum.
Pigs and pioneers would build America.
Cincinnati was called Porkopolis
in the 1830s; the hogs arrived,
as the hunger for them had, by river,
from which a short forced march led to slaughter.
A new country travels on its belly,
and manufacture starts in the barnyard:
hide for leather and stomach for pepsin.
In France, a farm family calls its pig
“Monsieur.” According to a CIA
tally early in 1978,
the Chinese kept 280 million
of the world's 400 million pigs;
perhaps all of them were called “The Chairman.”
Emmaeus, swineherd to Odysseus,
guarded 600 sows and their litters
(the males slept outside), and no doubt each sow
and piglet had its own name in that rich
matriarchal mire. And I like to think
that in that mild hospice future pork roasts
fattened toward oblivion with all
the love and dignity that husbandry
has given up to be an industry,
and that the meat of Emmaeus's coddled
porkers tasted a little sweeter for
the graces of affection and a name.
In the kitchen we compensate for missiles
in the world by fluting edges of crust
to bake rugged, primping rosettes and peaks
on cakes that are round tables with white
butter cloths swirled on, portable
Communion altars.
On the Sundays, ham toasted itself
with lipid melts, the honey veneer
waxed pork conceit to unnameable luster
and humps of rump poked
through the center of pineapple slices
so as to form tonsured clerical heads,
the Sundays being exceptional.
The waiting for the bread
helped us learn, when it arrived steaming
like kicked-up chariot dust then died down
quickly the staid attitude of its brown dress,
the lovely practical.
In the center of the table
we let it loaf. When that was through
we sliced it into a file to rival the keeping
of the Judgment notes. So we kept our own,
a second set, and judged the judges, toasting
with cranberry water in Libbey glasses
that came from deep in the Duz. All this
in moon's skim light.
Somehow the heat of the stove,
flames shooting up tall and blue, good looking
in the uniform, had me pulling down the door,
the seat of the Tappan's pants, having the heat push
against me, melting off my pancake makeup, nearly
a chrysalis moment, my face registering then
at least four hundred degrees, and rising
in knowledge, the heat rising too, touching
off the sensors for the absolute mantra
of the ringing, the heat sizzling through cornices
and shingles, until the house is a warm alternative
to heavenly and hellish extremes,
and I remove Mama's sweet potato pie, one made
âas are her bestâin her sleep when she can't
interfere, when she's dreaming at the countertop
that turns silk beside her elegant leaning, I slice it
and put the whipped cream on quick, while the pie
is hot so the peaks of cream will froth; these
are the Sundays my family suckles grace.
Hot and sweet and red and greasy,
I could eat a gallon easy:
Barbecue sauce!
Lay it on, hoss.
Nothing is dross
Under barbecue sauce.
Brush it on chicken, slosh it on pork,
Eat it with fingers, not with a fork.
I could eat barbecued turtle or squashâ
I could eat tar paper cooked and awash
In barbecue sauce.
I'd eat Spanish moss
With barbecue sauce.
Hear this from Evelyn Billiken Husky,
Formerly Evelyn B. of Sandusky:
“Ever since locating down in the South,
I have had barbecue sauce on my mouth.”
Nothing can gloss
Over barbecue sauce.
Mud Creek, Dreamland, Twixt-n-Tween,
the cue-joints rise through smoke
and glow like roadhouses on Heaven's way.
Or so the local gospels raise them,
each tongue ready to map the ramshackle
of shacks and houses, secret windows
and business-sector hip in some new
geography of truth. If the meek shall,
then a rib-mobile may shame the fixed pit
in a reading from the book of skill,
the grill-less one cook himself to legend
rib by rib. The great chain's links
are live and hermetic as bone
and where cue burns hotter than politics,
every mouth's the forge of change,
all scholars temporary and self-proclaimed.
One says he half-sublimes each time he eats
a rib and expects to go in a puff of smoke
when he finds the perfect pig:
he wanders like a ghost, his eyes
trying everything, a genuine R & D,
and once a day he proclaims the latest find,
a homegrown Moses canting
a vernacular talmud changeable as wind.
A word could crumple him, some backyard
master slapping mustard on a country rib
to turn the state of things entire.
So every word reverberates and mystery's
sown again. Rib or rump, dry-rub or ketchup,
the eternal terms turn and barbecue's rooted
or pulled anew. Theories proliferate
like flies after rain, but that's the usual business
where Georgia and the Carolinas river in,
the wind spirits Mississippi or CarÃb,
and piedmont's melted to the uplands
in open hearths and coke ovens, stitched tight
in cotton fields, and a kudzu vine's
the proper compass. Beef or pork,
catfish, quail or armadillo,
we've tried it all, loved it with brushes,
kiss of vinegar, tongue of flame,
so whatever it may not be,
we've covered all it is. Vegetarian
exception opens eggplant, means tofu's
the next horizon, purity an envelope
that's always opening. So summer afternoons
and Saturdays when the fires go up,
smoke rises to a signal and shapes
the single common word,
hand-made silence talking on every tongue.
Heaven and earth have always loved wine
,
so how could loving wine shame heaven?
âLI PO
We have a huge barrel of wine, but no cups.
That's fine with us. Every morning
we glow and in the evening we glow again.
They say there's no future for us. They're right.
Which is fine with us.
Translated by Coleman Banks
Jade winejars tied in blue silk.â¦
What's taking that wineseller so long?
Mountain flowers smiling, taunting me,
it's the perfect time to sip some wine,
ladle it out beneath my east window
at dusk, wandering orioles back again.
Spring breezes and their drunken guest:
today, we were meant for each other.
Translated by David Hinton