SWEET OLD WORLD

Metals invisibly alter the acid-structure of the proteins I beat in this copper bowl or heat in that iron pan. Nero d'Avola blackens my glass, leavens the spinning sink of me, purples my kiss-hungry mouth. I begin to sing, first in one language, then another, then in both at once, like Guillaume de Machaut. When my body started rejecting flesh it got crazy for fish. Now I'm nervous whenever I'm any distance from the seacoast. My money wanders off, sometimes returns to me brightened with gifts. I want you, are you reading this?

I give up

"In a room the size of one solitude
my heart
the size of one love
looks at the simple pretexts of its own happiness..."

(In Yunanistan, among leps, or among lepers; in a leftover building; Bildungsroman mythologies pushing and pinching at the edges of the overdetermined continent of my personhood; pâte brisée against a wet fork's tongs; drift.)

"...dying in the sorrow of a voice that tells me:
'I love your hands.'

I will plant my hands in the flowerbed
I will sprout, I know, I know, I know
and the sparrows will lay eggs
in the hollows of my inky fingers..."

Nationalist bile leaks all over foodstuffs which like languages seem to be so much grounded in their special ecology, their ring of mountains, their big river, and which like languages are: phonetic/vibrational sympathy with place is real, terroir is real – but also real is the endless shaivist dance of people over the rind of this beloved burning sphere. Apples wandered west from Alma Ata along the spice-road with the cinnamons and cloves and nutmegs that the dirty euro-lords were needing so badly in those days to mark their class difference: as amurrikan as apple pie, a promiscuous medieval fusion food with Central Asian roots! Likewise, for unnecessary example, eighteenth-century London slang is full of Hindi words on account of the gypsies who held such lovely & subtle sway there then, the gypsies having wandered from India centuries before; and a Turkish sweet-shop in Bergama was perfectly manageable by me with my Greek as all the pastry-names one learns in Greece are already Turkish.
>>SPIT!<<
It's like my old Phanariot grandfather used to always say, "Nationalist bile is the worst sauce."
***
"The Dutchmen [(Deutsch-"men")] of Pennsylvania's hills and valleys loved sauerkraut so much that they not only honored New Year's dinner with it, they even wrote poems and songs in its honor. During the First World War, when an edgy government attempted to rename sauerkraut "Liberty Cabbage," a fighting Dutchman named Charles Calvin Ziegler wrote these lines in its defense:

'Liberty Cabbage' now's the name,
But the thing remains the same.
Has it not the old aroma?
Is not "Liberty" a misnomer?
Why discard the name as hellish?
When the thing itself you relish?
You may flout it and may scold –
No name fits it like the old.
When applied to Sauer Kraut,
Liberty, beyond a doubt,
Loses something of her halo.
Should this little bit of reason
Be adjudged an act of treason
You may thrust me into jail O,
But in spite of all your pains,
SAUERKRAUT it still remains."

Big Juri was over last week with his spunky little bud of a granddaughter to help my brother harvest and sort his tulsi. My brother is all about ayurveda and thinks of tulsi as material for a special tisane good for the health of our bodies, whereas I feel it to be the living, photosynthesizing body of the goddess Tulasi Devi and am squeamish about the idea of gathering its leaves with an end toward boiling them in water. I took pictures, hammed for little Rosebud, laughed nervously in strained chitchat with my brother.