by Roy Blount
All by itself in its own juice,
And lying there all nice and loose—
That’s okra!
It may be poor for eating chips with,
It may be hard to come to grips with,
But okra’s such a wholesome food
It straightens out your attitude.
“Mm!” is how discerning folk respond
when they are served some okra.
Okra’s green,
Goes down with ease.
Forget cuisine,
Say “Okra, please.”
You can have strip pokra.
Give me a nice girl and a dish of okra.
Song to the Lentil
If we are good basic people, then one can assume in us
An affinity for the leguminous.
And there is no more fundamental
Legume than the lentil.
Lens derives from lentil—due
To the flat/round shape. It is true
The lentil’s opaque, but then who
Wants soup that he can look down through?
Lentil soup’s as clear as fens,
But just as the ocular is eased by the lens,
So by the lentil
Is the gastric and dental.
That image may be inexact. However, what’s meant’ll
Glow through the lentil—
The hearty but gentle,
Almost placental,
Simmered-to-soft-focus lentil.
Song to Barbecue Sauce
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 squash—
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.
Song to Catfish
To look at a living catfish,
Which is grey, which is whiskered and slick,
You may say, “Nunh-uhn, none of that fish,”
And look away quick.
But fried,
That’s the sweetest fish you ever tried.
Put a little dough on your hook and throw it out thayor
And pop you got a fish that cooked’ll be fit for a mayor.
Close white fishfleshfiakes, wrapped in crunch …
I couldn’t eat all the catfish I could eat for dinner if I started at lunch.
Song to Bacon
Consumer groups have gone and taken
Some of the savor out of bacon.
Protein-per-penny in bacon, they say,
Equals needles-per-square-inch of hay.
Well, I know, after cooking all
That’s left to eat is mighty small (You also get a lot of lossage
In life, romance, and country sausage),
And I will vote for making it cheaper,
Wider, longer, leaner, deeper,
But let’s not throw the baby, please,
Out with the (visual rhyme here) grease.
There’s nothing crumbles like bacon still,
And t don’t think there ever will
Be anything, whate’er you use
For meat, that chews like bacon chews.
And also: I wish these groups would tell
Me whether they counted in the smell.
The smell of it cooking’s worth $2.10 a pound.
And how bout the sound?
Song to Onions
They improve everything, pork chops to soup,
And not only that but each onion’s a group.
Peel back the skin, delve into tissue
And see how an onion has been blessed with issue.
Every layer produces an ovum:
You think you’ve got three then you find you’ve got fovum.
Onion on on-
lon
on onion they run,
Each but the smallest one some onion’s mother:
An onion comprises a half-dozen other.
In sum then an onion you could say is less
Than the sum of its parts.
But then I like things that more are than profess—
In food and the arts.
Things pungent, not tony.
I’ll take Damon Runyon
Over Antonioni—
Who if an i wanders becomes Anti-onion.
I’m anti-baloney.
Although a baloney sandwich would
Right now, with onions, be right good.
And so would sliced onions,
Chewed with cheese,
Or onions chopped and sprinkled
Over black-eyed peas:
Black-eyed,
grey-gravied,
absorbent of essences,
eaten on New Year’s Eve*
peas.
* Actually, black-eyed peas with onions chopped up in them are eaten on New Year’s Day. On New Year’s Eve, onion dip is eaten. I put Eve here for the sound, and so that I could go on in the next stanza to wonder what would have happened to human nature if “old years’ Eve” had bitten an onion instead of an apple in the Garden of Eden. However, I was advised by a succession of readers, editors, biblical scholars and feminists that Eve had even less place in an onion poem that Antonioni. So out she went.
Song to Homemade Ice Cream
Homemade ice cream is utterly different,
Far more reviverant,
From that which you buy in the stores.
Homemade ice cream is something you eat enough of to feel for two days in your pores.
The peaches in homemade ice cream taste and chew like peaches,
And that’s what they are.
And as for the milk and the sugar and egg whites, each is
Something that Mama brought home from the grocery herself in the car.
And Daddy goes out and brings home some ice
And salts it down in the churn,
And everybody knows the churn,
And each kid once or twice
Takes a turn at turning the churn,
Occasionally peeking in to learn
Whether the stuff is beginning to form,
Because the evening is certainly warm ….
You can’t have any till after the chicken.
But, considering the chicken, who’s kicken?
Homemade ice cream takes ahold of you,
Turns to young what’s getting old of you—
And also what’s warm into the cold of you,
But that at such an intimate level
It might be effective at blocking the devil.
The parents they may wrangle,
The kiddies they may roam—
But sitting round with their dishes of homemade,
They all make it home.
One Spot of Gravy
(Thanks to Henry Taylor)
Our happy home was clean and bright
Till he crept into view.
I’d come right home ev’ry night
To mop and scrub with you.
But you
gave him
one careless smile
And oh how my heart bleeds—
One spot of gravy
is all a cockroach needs.
One spot of gravy
And the straight and narrow’s wavy;
One spot of gravy
Is all a cockroach needs.
The sad thing was he came to sell
You insect spray that day.
But he was slipp’ry
and you fell—
What’s sure won’t stay that way.
You let drop one sticky word.
Our garden’s filled with weeds.
One spot of gravy
is all a cockroach needs.
I happened to come home for lunch
To give you a surprise.
There were you and a cockroach scrunch-
ing down before my eyes.
You dropped the dustcloth just that once,
And oh how trouble breeds—
One spot of gravy
is all a cockroach needs.
One spot of gravy,
And you cried out, “Peccavi!”
One spot of gravy
is all a cockroach needs.
Song to My Mother’s Macaroni and Cheese
I wish that I
Were up to my knees
In my mother’s mac-
Aroni and cheese.
Song to the Poet’s Stomach
Stomach, as you know, I have
Had tonight some herring snacks,
Choco-chip ice cream
And Jack Daniel’s.
Not all at once, certainly,
I was watching a long movie on TV with Herbert Lom in it
And I think Margaret O’Brien—
Is that possible?—
And Alison Skipworth,
And these things came to hand and seemed to go.
Stomach you and I have been together thirty years and I
Would honor you for all you’ve handled:
Anything the icebox can and more.
Stomach you stick out too far
But you have stuck with me
Through thick and thin. When I think
Of some of the times we didn’t throw up!
Kielbasa, peppers, beer, shots and cigarillos
In Homestead, Pennsylvania, all night long.
Polish vodka, chili, pastries and champagne
In Forth Worth, Texas, at a wedding.
That was crazy, that night, but you know
You wanted it as much as I did.
Stomach you are my homestead
When I hunger, you are a fort
Worth support with such antacids
As you need.
Stomach here it is two A.M.
And I can’t say about the soul
And do not know my mind,
But the dark night of an organ
Redoubtable as you are
Is scarcely more anxious than supper.
Stomach we can gut it out.
We’ll have a glass of buttermilk or wine
And then turn in—
To what,
We’ll see in the morning.
We may disagree,
But we will face our breakfast doughty,
Though you rumble like a fond
Put-out loyal bulldog, though
Our strange heart burn.
CORN PRONE
LET ME TELL YOU something that happened to me in the Times Square Nathan’s that still sticks in my craw.
I like Nathan’s hot dogs, and Nathan’s fried shrimp (which, strangely enough, are fried the way my mother used to fry them in Georgia), and Nathan’s tartar sauce that you dip Nathan’s shrimp in. And I like Nathan’s corn on the cob.
I prefer—I would sell one of my relatives for—the sweet, white, exquisite little-crisp-kerneled corn on the cob that you get, if you know where to look, in Georgia. Or the just-off-the-stalk Butter and Sugar (yellow kernels alternating with white) corn that you can get, in season, in the New England country where I live. But the plump, yellow kernels of Nathan’s are succulent too, in a cruder way.
So when, years ago, Nathan’s opened its outlet on Times Square, I hied myself there with alacrity. And purchased fried shrimp, a vanilla shake, and a nice, juicy ear. And carried it all over to one of the many Formica tables in the place.
Now I know there are—I hate to use so harsh a term—scummy people that come into Nathan’s. But I have a strong stomach. That’s one thing I’ve always had, a strong stomach. The last time I threw up was 1969, and that was unusual circumstances, that’s a whole nother story. Didn’t have anything to do with what I ate, or at least it mainly had to do with getting hit in the stomach, and then I ate some stuff, but it was getting hit that made me throw up. I tell you what. I’d probably be a lot better off today, weigh less, have a lighter karma (if I understand Eastern religion at all; maybe I don’t) if I threw up more often. But I don’t.
So I can handle Nathan’s. It was crowded and stirring in there, this first time I went in. People were milling around, the tables stayed full despite a rapid turnover, and they were shared by strangers. (And I’m talking about strangers. But that’s all right.)
Everyone was fully dressed and no one was lying down, and no one was relaxing, but otherwise Nathan’s was much like the beach at Coney Island, I thought. As I settled in for a substantial if not ideally digestible lunch, an exercised mother impelled her three busy children, aged about four, six, and eight, and hard-looking every one of them, into the three chairs opposite me.
So, okay. We all got to live. But.
“Now what you want to eat?” the mother queried over my shoulder—her intention evidently being to leave the young ones there while she went for the food.
“That!” said the eldest of the three, a girl, and she physically poked, with her finger, my ear of corn.
I sat there. Staring incredulously at my corn. As it rocked back and forth slightly in its butter. And then I stared at the trespassing girl, who sat—with an air about her of not having exceeded her rights, or even having begun to exercise them good—some fifteen inches away from my nose.
“Cynthia. …” said the mother then, sharply. And I figured the girl was going to get a lesson in the inviolability, in a civilized society, of another person’s ear of corn. “… that is not enough.”
So, against her will, Cynthia ordered a hamburger and a large Coke to go with her corn, and the whole family continued to take no notice of me personally as I resignedly ate mine.
Okay. Okay. I guess I should have leaped up and seized either Cynthia or her mother by the throat and thrown her to the floor. I guess you could say that by not speaking out, by not standing up and saying, “Now listen here. Now listen here. People don’t do that to other people’s corn”—I guess by not doing that, I was as guilty of ignoring their personhoods as they were of mine.
But I was astonished. You don’t poke another person’s corn! Okay, it was a child. But my children wouldn’t poke another person’s corn. And if they did I would first turn to the owner of the corn and say, “Listen. If you want to have these children brought before charges, I understand. They deserve to be sent to the Tombs for what they did. But if you could find it in your heart not to saddle them with a criminal record, could you just let me snatch a knot in them?”
And I would snatch a knot in them.
I don’t mean physically. I don’t pound on my children. But I have, by word, gesture and maybe grabbing their arm or something, let them know when they have done an outrageous thing.
You know what I mean? I mean when Roy Cohn and George Steinbrenner and Alexander Haig and Jerry Falwell and John Simon were children going around poking other people’s corn, if their mothers or fathers had just snatched them bald-headed (I mean figuratively), once, and said, “You can’t get away with that shit,” they wouldn’t be such a problem today.
Of course their mothers or fathers would have been lying. You can get away with that shit. It sticks in my craw though.
ONE PIG JUMPED
Second Person Rural:
More Essays of a Sometime Farmer
By Noel Perrin
Illustrated by F. Allyn Massey
David R. Godine, $10
THIS IS A DANGEROUS book. It almost made me decide to go ahead and get pigs. The country, where I live less agriculturally than Noel Perrin, is full of such temptations: to go ahead and get chickens, s
heep, ducks, a tractor … And I have resisted all of them except cats, dogs, a wood stove, a compost heap, a vegetable garden and a horse (who looked at me the other day as I was picking up a wheelbarrow full of manure and said, “Uh … You realize what that is?”). Still, Mr. Perrin makes pigs sound pretty inviting.
Of course, it is hard to write badly about pigs. But Noel Perrin makes pigs seem pretty inviting anew. He had one that jumped, and two more that were into earth art. He also had a diminutive farmyard-bred Bantam rooster that eventually (by proffering worms) befriended, but never managed to seduce, four imposing virgin Golden Comet hens that had been raised in a modern egg-factory and therefore lacked passion. The worms, and the bugs that two of the hens learned to catch, made their eggs’ yolks much darker and more savory, though. This book almost made me decide to go ahead and get chickens.
Since I finally fought off these temptations, I would fail the immigration test that Mr. Perrin urges for the control of urban influx: When an upper-middle-class family moved to a rural area, “they would be issued visas for one year. At the end of that year … they would present evidence of having acclimated. For example, they show proof of having taken care of two farm animals of at least pig size, or of one cow, for at least nine months. Complete care would be rigorously interpreted. Even one weekend of paying someone to feed the pigs or milk the cow would disqualify them.” This proposal may seem Draconian, but I like the spirit. I even favor some strictures; the country tends to become a place for weekenders, many of whom seem to think that it exists for the sake of their relaxation.
Even though Noel Perrin grew up suburban and his main work is literary (the book Dr. Bowdler’s Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England & America, for instance, and teaching English at Dartmouth), and though he confesses with chagrin that “the two-by-six evaporator that we use to make maple syrup is called the Pleasure Model,” he seems somehow to have become very nearly a farmer. Sometimes people, in fact, mistake him for the real article—thereby doing his soul good and providing him subjects for essays.
That’s what this book is—a collection of essays about New England country living, a sequel to Mr. Perrin’s equally felicitous First Person Rural. I have a high resistance to this genre, but here it is farmed well. If you are at all interested in splitting wood—as who with halfway decent instincts is not—you will enjoy reading Noel Perrin on various newfangled riving devices’ inferiority to the good old maul. I think anybody, or at least anybody interested in leverage, will want to read Perrin on the peavey. (“How about Peavey on the perrin?” hardened urbanites may be snorting. Fine. Let them stay down on the pavement among the pigeons.)