I dreamt in the night I had gone on to Glory,
And found it was full of loose girls who weren’t whory—
Whose faces were sweet, whose bodies incredible,
Whose sweat was white wine and whose few clothes were edible,
And all of whom naturally knew special arts;
And along with the wholes there were sumptuous parts:
Great legs, cherry lips, and deltas aglow,
And breasts you could nibble and cause them to grow,
And sirenlike voices expressing their gratitude
To me on account of my marvelous attitude.
And through the whole business I kept saying, “Look.
It’s all very nice, but can someone here cook?”
Pie.
Oh my.
Nothing tastes sweet,
Wet, salty and dry
All at once so well as pie.
Apple and pumpkin and mince and black bottom,
I’ll come to your place every day if you’ve got ’em. Pie.
Though Ham was one of Noah’s sons
(like Japheth), I can’t see
That Ham meant any more to him
Than ham has meant to me.
On Christmas Eve
I said, “Yes ma’am,
I do believe
I’ll have more ham.”
I said, “Yes ma’am,
I do believe
I’ll have more ham.”
I said, “Yes ma’am,
I do believe
I’ll have more ham.”
And then after dinner my uncle said he
Was predominantly English but part Cherokee.
“As near as I can figure,” I said, “I am
An eighth Scotch-Irish and seven-eighths ham.”
Ham.
My soul.
I took a big hot roll,
I put in some jam,
And butter that melted down in with the jam,
Which was blackberry jam,
And a big old folded-over oozy slice of HAM …
And my head swam.
Ham!
Hit me with a hammah,
Wham bam bam!
What good ammah
Without mah ham?
Ham’s substantial, ham is fat,
Ham is firm and sound.
Ham’s what God was getting at
When he made pigs so round.
Aunt Fay’s as big as she can be—
She weighs one hundred, she must weigh three.
But Fay says, “Ham! Oh Lord, praise be,
Ham has never hampered me!”
Next to Mama and Daddy and Gram,
We all love the family ham.
So let’s program
A hymn to ham,
To appetizing, filling ham.
(I knew a girl named Willingham.)
And after that we’ll all go cram
Ourselves from teeth to diaphragm
Full of ham.
I like to eat an uncooked oyster.
Nothing’s slicker, nothing’s moister.
Nothing’s easier on your gorge
Or, when the time comes, to dischorge.
But not to let it too long rest
Within your mouth is always best.
For if your mind dwells on an oyster …
Nothing’s slicker. Nothing’s moister.
I prefer my oyster fried.
Then I’m sure my oyster’s died.
When my mind’s unsettled,
When I don’t feel spruce,
When my nerves get frazzled,
When my flesh gets loose—
What knits
Me back together’s grits.
Grits with gravy,
Grits with cheese:
Grits with bacon,
Grits with peas.
Grits with a minimum.
Of two over-medium eggs mixed in ’em: um!
Grits, grits, it’s
Grits I sing—
Grits fits
In with anything.
Rich and poor, black and white,
Lutheran and Campbellite,
Jews and Southern Jesuits,
All acknowledge buttered grits.
Give me two hands, give me my wits,
Give me forty pounds of grits.
Grits at taps, grits at reveille.
I am into grits real heavily.
True grits,
More grits,
Fish, grits and collards.
Life is good where grits are swallered.
Grits
Sits
Right.
The neighborhood stores are all out of broccoli, Loccoli.
Boston baked, green; red, Navy, lima;
Pinto, black, butter; kidney, string—I’m a
Person who leans
Toward all kinds of beans.
I hope that plenny
Of farmers sow them.
You’re not any-
Where till you know them.
No accident beans
In common speech means …
Well, are you anything other than prim?
Have you keenness, spirit, vim?
Can you make all kinds of scenes?
Then we say you’re full of beans.
“A fabis abstinete,” Pythagoras said,
Meaning “Eat no beans.” Where was his head?
Yankee, pole, mung; Kentucky Wonder;
Wax, soy, speckled; they all come under
The heading of beans. Flavor apart,
They are good for your heart.
I feel that I will never cease
To hold in admiration grease.
It’s grease makes frying things so crackly,
During and after. Think how slackly
Bacon lies before its grease
Effusively secures release.
Then that same grease protects the eggs
From hard burnt ruin. Grease! It begs
Comparison to that old stone
That turned base metals gold. The on-
Ly thing that grease won’t do with food
Is make it evanesce once chewed.
In fact grease lends a certain weight
That makes it clear that you just ate
Something solid. Something thick.
Something like das Ding an sich.
This firm substantiation is al-
Lied directly with the sizzle.
Oh when our joints refuse to function,
When we stand in need of unction,
Bring us two pork chops apiece,
A skillet, lots of room and grease.
Though Batter’s great and Fire is too,
And so, if you can Fry, are You,
What lubricates and crisps at once—
That’s Grease—makes all the difference.
String beans are good, and ripe tomatoes,
And collard greens and sweet potatoes,
Sweet corn, field peas, and squash and beets—
But when a man rears back and eats
He wants okra.
Good old okra.
Oh wow okra, yessiree,
Okra is Okay with me.
Oh okra’s favored far and wide,
Oh you can eat it boiled or fried,
Oh either slick or crisp inside,
Oh I once knew a man who died
Without okra.
Little pepper-sauce on it,
Oh! I wan’ it:
Okra.
Old Homer Ogletree’s so high
On okra he keeps lots laid by:
He keeps it in a safe he locks up,
He eats so much, can’t keep his socks up.
(Which goes to show it’s no misnomer
When people call him Okra Homer.)
Okra!
Oh you can make some gumbo wit’ it,
But most of all I like to git it
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
(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.
I wish that I
Were up to my knees
In my mother’s mac-
Aroni and cheese.
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.