The Hungry Ear (14 page)

Oh it was a ride on Watneys plunging red barrel
through all the burning ghats of most carnal ambition
and never again will I want such illumination
for three days on end concerning my own mortal coil
but I signed my plate in the end with a licked knife and fork
and green-and-gold spotted, I sang for my pains like the free
before I passed out among all the stars of Cilfynydd.

CRAIG ARNOLD

I'm cooking Thai—you bring the beer
.

The same order, although it's been a year

—friendships based on food are rarely stable.

        We should have left ours at the table

where it began, and went to seed,

that appetite we shared, based less in need

than boredom—always the cheapest restaurants,

      Thai, Szechwan, taking our chance

with gangs and salmonella—what was hot?

       The five-starred curries? The penciled-out

entrees?—the first to break a sweat

would leave the tip. I raise the knocker, let

it fall, once, twice, and when the door is opened

        I can't absorb, at first, what's happened

—face loosened a notch, eyes with a gloss

        of a fever left to run its course

too long, letting the unpropped skin collapse

        in a wrinkled heap. Only the lips

I recognize—dry, cracked, chapped

from licking. He looks as though he's slept

a week in the same clothes.
Come in, kick back
,

        he says, putting my warm six-pack

of Pale & Bitter into the fridge to chill.

        
There's no music. I had to sell

the stereo to support my jones
, he jokes,

        meaning the glut of good cookbooks

that cover one whole wall, in stacked milk crates

        six high, nine wide, two deep. He grates

unripe papaya into a bowl,

fires off questions—
When did you finish school?

Why not? Still single? Why? That dive

that served the ginger eels, did it survive?

I don't get out much. Shall we go sometime?

        He squeezes the quarters of a lime

into the salad, adds a liberal squirt

        of chili sauce.
I won't be hurt

if you don't want seconds. It's not as hot

        
as I would like to make it, but

you always were a bit of a lightweight
.

        
Here, it's finished, try a bite
.

He holds a forkful of the crisp

green shreds for me to take. I swallow, gasp,

choke—pins and needles shoot

through mouth and throat, a heat so absolute

as to seem freezing. I know better

not to wash it down with ice water

—it seems to cool, but only spreads the fire—

        I can only bite my lip and swear

quietly to myself, so caught

up in our old routine—
What? This is hot?

You're sweating. Care for another beer?

—it doesn't occur to me that he's sincere

until, my eyes watering, half in rage,

       I open the door and find the fridge

stacked full with little jars of curry paste,

       arranged by color, labels faced

carefully outward, some pushed back

to make room for the beer—no milk, no take—

out cartons of gelatinous chow mein,

       no pickles rotting in green brine,

not even a jar of moldy mayonnaise.

        —I see you're eating well these days,

I snap, pressing the beaded glass

of a beer bottle against my neck, face,

temples, anywhere it will hurt

enough to draw the fire out, and divert

attention from the fear that follows

close behind.… He stares at me, the hollows

under his eyes more prominent than ever.

       —
I don't eat much these days. The flavor

has gone out of everything, almost
.

        For the first time it's not a boast.

You know those small bird chili pods—the type

        
you wear surgical gloves to chop
,

then soak your knife and cutting board

in vinegar? A month ago I scored

a fresh bag—they were so ripe

I couldn't cut them warm, I had to keep

them frozen. I forget what I had meant

        
to make, that night—I'd just cleaned

the kitchen, wanted to fool around

with some old recipe I'd lost, and found

jammed up behind a drawer—I had

maybe too much to drink. “Can't be that bad,”

I remember thinking. “What's the fuss

about? It's not as if they're poisonous
…”

Those peppers, I ate them, raw—a big fistful

        
shoved in my mouth, swallowed whole
,

and more, and more. It wasn't hard
.

You hear of people getting their eyes charred

to cinders, staring into an eclipse
…

        He speaks so quickly, one of his lips

has cracked, leaks a trickle of blood

along his chin.…
I never understood
.

I try to speak, to offer some

small shocked rejoinder, but my mouth is numb

tingling, hurts to move—
I called in sick

        
next morning, said I'd like to take

time off. She thinks I've hit the bottle
.

The high those peppers give me is more subtle—

I'm lucid, I remember my full name
,

my parents' birthdays, how to win a game

of chess in seven moves, why which and that

        
mean different things. But what we eat
,

why, what it means, it's all been explained

        —
Take this curry, this fine-tuned

balance of humors, coconut liquor thinned

        
by broth, sour pulp of tamarind

cut through by salt, set off by fragrant

galangal, ginger, basil, cilantro, mint
,

the warp and woof of texture, aubergines

        
that barely hold their shape, snap beans

heaped on jasmine, basmati rice

—
it's a lie, all of it—pretext—artifice

—
ornament—sugar-coating—for
…

He stops, expressing heat from every pore

of his full face, unable to give vent

        to any more, and sits, silent,

a whole minute.
You understand?

Of course, I tell him. As he takes my hand

I can't help but notice the strength his grip

      has lost, as he lifts it to his lip,

presses it for a second, the torn flesh

        as soft, as tenuous, as ash,

not in the least harsh or rough,

wreck of a mouth, that couldn't say
enough
.

JIMMY SANTIAGO BACA

I prefer red chile over my eggs
and potatoes for breakfast.
Red chile
ristras
decorate my door,
dry on my roof, and hang from eaves.
They lend open-air vegetable stands
historical grandeur, and gently swing
with an air of festive welcome.
I can hear them talking in the wind,
haggard, yellowing, crisp, rasping
tongues of old men, licking the breeze.

But grandmother loves green chile.

When I visit her,
she holds the green chile pepper
in her wrinkled hands.
Ah, voluptuous, masculine,
an air of authority and youth simmers
from its swan-neck stem, tapering to a flowery
collar, fermenting resinous spice.
A well-dressed gentleman at the door
my grandmother takes sensuously in her hand,
rubbing its firm glossed sides,
caressing the oily rubbery serpent,
with mouth-watering fulfillment,
fondling its curves with gentle fingers.
Its bearing magnificent and taut
as flanks of a tiger in mid-leap,
she thrusts her blade into
and cuts it open, with lust
on her hot mouth, sweating over the stove,
bandanna round her forehead,
mysterious passion on her face
as she serves me green chile con carne
between soft warm leaves of corn tortillas,
with beans and rice—her sacrifice
to her little prince.
I slurp from my plate
with last bit of tortilla, my mouth burns
and I hiss and drink a tall glass of cold water.

All over New Mexico, sunburned men and women
drive rickety trucks stuffed with gunny-sacks
of green chile, from Belen, Veguita, Willard, Estancia,
San Antonio y Socorro, from fields
to roadside stands, you see them roasting green chile
in screen-sided homemade barrels, and for a dollar a bag,
we relive this old, beautiful ritual again and again.

GARRETT HONGO

One arm hooked around the frayed strap
of a tar-black patent-leather purse,
the other cradling something for dinner:
fresh bunches of spinach from a J-Town
yaoya
,
sides of split Spanish mackerel from Alviso's,
maybe a loaf of Langendorf; she steps
off the hissing bus at Olympic and Fig,
begins the three-block climb up the hill,
passing gangs of schoolboys playing war,
Japs against Japs, Chicanas chalking sidewalks
with the holy double-yoked crosses of hopscotch,
and the Korean grocer's wife out for a stroll
around the neighborhood of Hawaiian apartments
just starting to steam with cooking
and the anger of young couples coming home
from work, yelling at kids, flicking on
TV sets for the Wednesday Night Fights.

If it were May, hydrangeas and jacaranda
flowers in the streetside trees would be
blooming through the smog of late spring.
Wisteria in Masuda's front yard would be
shaking out the long tresses of its purple hair.
Maybe mosquitoes, moths, a few orange butterflies
settling on the lattice of monkey flowers
tangled in chain-link fences by the trash.

But this is October, and Los Angeles
seethes like a billboard under twilight
From used-car lots and the movie houses uptown,
long silver sticks of light probe the sky.
From the Miracle Mile, whole freeways away,
a brilliant fluorescence breaks out
and makes war with the dim squares
of yellow kitchen light winking on
in all the side streets of the Barrio.

She climbs up the two flights of flagstone
stairs to 201-B, the spikes of her high heels
clicking like kitchen knives on a cutting board,
props the groceries against the door,
fishes through memo pads, a compact,
empty packs of chewing gum, and finds her keys.

The moon then, cruising from behind
a screen of eucalyptus across the street,
covers everything, everything
in sight, in a heavy light like yellow onions.

WILLIAM MATTHEWS

How easily happiness begins by
dicing onions. A lump of sweet butter
slithers and swirls across the floor
of the sauté pan, especially if its
errant path crosses a tiny slick
of olive oil. Then a tumble of onions.

This could mean soup or risotto
or chutney (from the Sanskrit
chatni
, to lick). Slowly the onions
go limp and then nacreous
and then what cookbooks call clear,
though if they were eyes you could see

clearly the cataracts in them.
It's true it can make you weep
to peel them, to unfurl and to tease
from the taut ball first the brittle,
caramel-colored and decrepit
papery outside layer, the least

recent the reticent onion
wrapped around its growing body,
for there's nothing to an onion
but skin, and it's true you can go on
weeping as you go on in, through
the moist middle skins, the sweetest
and thickest, and you can go on
in to the core, to the bud-like,
acrid, fibrous skins densely
clustered there, stalky and incomplete,
and these are the most
pungent, like the nuggets of nightmare

and rage and murmur animal
comfort that infant humans secrete.
This is the best domestic perfume.
You sit down to eat with a rumor
of onions still on your twice-washed
hands and lift to your mouth a hint

of a story about loam and usual
endurance. It's there when you clean up
and rinse the wine glasses and make
a joke, and you leave the minutest
whiff on it on the light switch,
later, when you climb the stairs.

ADRIENNE RICH

Only to have a grief
equal to all these tears!

There's not a sob in my chest.
Dry-hearted as Peer Gynt

I pare away, no hero,
merely a cook.

Crying was labor, once
when I'd good cause.
Walking, I felt my eyes like wounds
raw in my head,
so postal-clerks, I thought, must stare.
A dog's look, a cat's, burnt to my brain—
yet all that stayed
stuffed in my lungs like smog.

These old tears in the chopping-bowl.

DENISE LEVERTOV

What is green in me
darkens, muscadine.

If woman is inconstant,
good, I am faithful to

ebb and flow, I fall
in season and now

is a time of ripening.
If her part

is to be true,
a north star,

good, I hold steady
in the black sky