The Hungry Ear Read Online Free PDF

pickles tell us how they should be eaten
sweet, sour and unctuous
butterbeans are named in your honor
creamy like you when cooked right
glazed with you and black pepper
memories.
    Who has not thought of you when you are not around?
hungry and romantic
blamed for a multitude of sins
doctors who decry you are often found at your back door
new science has shown;
you ain’t all that bad.
in fact, your very nature may be good for the fabric of our brain
I knew that already
    Think not of others.
Margarine, unworthy imitation, it has no song
Lard, Schmaltz Oil.
they are not so universal
nor so simple and complex
an infinite story
    I place you in an ancestral black iron pan
watch you glaze across the black surface
when the bubbles foam and begin to subside
it is an invitation
    add the minced onions and sweat
the beginning of so many journeys
from gumbo to perloo
I always begin with you

American Milk
    RUTH STONE
    Then the butter we put on our white bread
was colored with butter yellow, a cancerous dye,
and all the fourth grades were taken by streetcar
to the Dunky Company to see milk processed; milk bottles
riding on narrow metal cogs through little doors that flapped.
The sour damp smell of milky-wet cement floors:
we looked through great glass windows at the milk.
Before we were herded back to the streetcar line,
we were each given a half pint of milk in tiny
milk bottles with straws to suck it up. In this way
we gradually learned about our country.

Sad Verso of the Sunny________
    LIZ WALDNER
    Veldt? Sounds good to me.
Like melt. Back when you could eat Velveeta
and call it cheese. My grandfather’s macaroni and cheese
featured a whole brick of Velveeta. I liked peeling away
its beautiful silver wrapper,
Velveeta Velveeta
all over in blue.
    The expanses of time in which there was this grandfather
appeared endless when I was in them. Who
could see to the ends of the plains and so see her end
beyond them? Who could think to look? You
(like Ohio and its vowels) went on forever,
just ate your macaroni and cheese, relishing
the brown bubbles on top, then did the next thing,
were the next moment surrounded and held in it
by all the things you didn’t know would end.
Nothing ceded. No portend.
Only geranium and melamine
and thank you,
everywhere preceded by some please.

The Butter Factory
    LES MURRAY
    It was built of things that must not mix:
paint, cream and water, fire and dusty oil.
You heard the water dreaming in its large
kneed pipes, up from the weir. And the cordwood
our fathers cut for the furnace stood in walls
like the sleeper-stacks of a continental railway.
    The cream arrived in lorried tides; its procession
crossed a platform of workers’ stagecraft:
Come here
Friday-Legs! Or I’ll feel your hernia
—
Overalled in milk’s colour, men moved the heart of milk,
separated into thousands, along a roller track—
Trucks?
That one of mine, son, it pulls like a sixteen-year-old
—
to the tester who broached the can lids, causing fat tears,
who tasted, dipped and did his thin stoppered chemistry
on our labour, as the empties chattered downstage and fumed.
    Under the high roof, black-crusted and stainless steels
were walled apart: black romped with leather belts
but paddlewheels sailed the silvery vats where muscles
of the one deep cream were exercised to a bullion
to be blocked in paper. And between waves of delivery
the men trod on water, hosing the rainbows of a shift.
    It was damp April even at Christmas round every
margin of the factory. Also it opened the mouth
to see tackles on glibbed gravel, and the mossed char louvres
of the ice-plant’s timber tower streaming with
heavy rain all day, above the droughty paddocks
of the totem cows round whom our lives were dancing.

O Cheese
    DONALD HALL
    In the pantry the dear dense cheeses, Cheddars and harsh
Lancashires; Gorgonzola with its magnanimous manner;
the clipped speech of Roquefort; and a head of Stilton
that speaks in a sensuous riddling