Julia’s child,
who’s only content to hear
Groucho explain Duck Soup now
fifty-two times a day, must
take in her mother’s mantle:
My appetites haven’t adjusted
much with age—
my wet nurse is worried.
I just like okonomiyaki
and cat-herd pie, light
cigarettes, yirgacheffe
coffee, and sarcasm.
What’s cat-herd pie?
It’s a tragically common question:
Boil a chicken, then
wait a week, maybe more,
’til the schmaltz is almost questionable,
there’s maybe a fishiness
Annie Dillard or some fine
pea-green princess deigns
to mutter of unto the broth-
choked bones that haughtily
gobbling gods had settled
before her—transpose the
stock into heirloom rice
all the colors of crow’s feet
wove across scales of a mamba
that Thoth ordained once
Oenomel Queen of the bean-
bid coloratura. Then nettle
a medley of Belvedere onions,
celery root, red carrots, cruciferous
stalks by the bellyful, broccoli
rabe uncoiled from orgying
ragweed, tawny cauliflower
worked from exhausted tub-caulk,
halberd asparagus squired
from birth to be better than
no svelte, leather-lipped catling—
Pour all the lot in a pot with a
Pharisee’s pillar of aged Himalayan
rock salt and swaddle the mix with a
corset of crinolined chicken thighs
whipped to a finicky, styptic paste.
Let all of it age
for a week and a day and then
layer it, emperor’s rice enrobed in
carrot-rounds mocking doubloons and cacao beans,
crinoline chicken thigh medley, rice, repeat
for how many muttering times it
takes to feel it,
feel the grass blades itching at
little pink cherubic toe beans, feel the
beetling bead of a bluejay begging to
burst between shrill and spindly teeth. Add
Heat
400 degrees or so, just be certain
your oven can’t count above
two-twenty-five, for, let’s say,
forty-four cold jupiterian minutes,
and—tralala, then
serve, as you always have, eat
without using your lips and hands, and,
curl around maybe your neighbor’s gate
house, brashly confessing that everything’s
yellow now. Smoke. Retreat. Relent. Recant. Repeat,
though only as needed.
