Epopoeia of the Food and Drink of the United States (A Dream in Hell) 1 Beautiful like a baby calf is the song of chicken fried with batter, the long red and white picnic tablecloth is finer than the finest lady’s legs, the finest thing there is to embark upon a heaping bowl of coleslaw, shrimp from the gulf coast are delicious, gushing with wine as if feeling, like honey mussels, in Redmond or Olympia, harvested by fishwives, in the seaweed, and the glory of banjos in Baton Rouge, their juices course through them like ageless autumn lemons, like mom's fragrant pot pie, chocked full of juicy stew, widens the gullet, and, baked, cries out blooming peach tree blossoms. 2 What would you say to some barbecue ribs, burning hot grilled on a charcoal fire in June on the banks of a man made lake, pines or cedar trees that sum up the dramatic atmosphere of a damp sunset at Lake Lanier or Stone Mountain, or to a clam chowder, whose name is inextricably related to Manhattan or Rhode Island or New England? No, you hunt quail and you grill it, just like you hear honky-tonk or stars and stripes at the feet of Mount Rushmore, and fried catfish along the Chattahoochee where it leaps into the sacred sizzling skillet, superbly fine river fish, makes fishing boats rich while the sisters Lee, as if in pain, sweat what's human and divine on the grand antique family fiddle. 3 Tremendous turkeys that smell like summer, almost human, autumn shades of walnut or chestnut, I eat them everywhere, and in D.C. I kiss them, like the vats where barley sighs like the prettiest girl in Jersey raising her skirt underneath the lights of the big apple, same as the roof off of a block party with streamers and flags where we drink in red plastic cups a substantial whiskey and beer, or the love mattress, upon which we set sail and sighing face each other and the night’s tremendous oceans, into whose horrible darkness, black and tenacious flows the bloody calla lily, or the teardrop that falls in our moths as we joyfully sing. 4 Napa Valley wine is enormous and dark in the California sunset, and when it's in your blood, nostalgia and the apology to heroism sing in the wheels of spurs to the beast’s hide, dancing to the fundamental tune of backwater rapids against the frothy red glare. 5 Nicely aged bourbon bellows in its cellars like a great sacred cow, and St. Louis will be golden, like a rib-eye on the grill, all over the bloodied paths towards Oklahoma, autumn's guitar will weep like a soldier's widow, and we'll remember everything we didn’t do and could have and should have and wanted to, like a madman staring down a town's abandoned well, watching, ear shattering, the engines of youth rev down dawn's wide gust crumbling like memories in the abyss. 6 The saddle glows all across the Midwest, mountain range to mountain range, booming like a great combine with its 20 foot span, booming like a cow auctioneer or a righteous pastor or tornado season, lasso raised up against the sky on top of a guffaw, a hyuck or a yeehaw, splashed with sun and hard work, where manure perfumes dung heaps like a domestic god, with tremendous balls like a widow. 7 A mighty log cabin with its open yard, apple trees, front porch scented with remote antiquity, where the bootlegger and his still would sing, drop by drop, a sense of eternity into the water, recalling old ancestors with its tremulous pendulum, exists, same as in Madison as in Franklin or Fairview or Springfield, although it’s the little town of Hodgenville Kentucky that most proudly proclaims the wooden troughs or pig iron pots, wide open spaces, the Appalachians, the original wild west, civil war and emancipation, in little log cabins, from Tennessee to Ohio, who express it proudly in tremendous language, eating ears of pigs eating ears of corn. 8 Because, if it's necessary to stuff yourself with hot dogs in a Detroit Coney before dying, on a rainy day, blessed with a strawberry milkshake from fresh upstate dairy, and smoke, bathing in conversation, friends and the munchies, launching yourself into terrible leaps and bounds, blubbering, savoring the booming chili in spoonfuls and fries, it's also necessary to get your meat from the Kansas City stockyards in March, when the pigs look like televangelists and the televangelists look like swine or hippopotamus, and wash the food down with some fiery sips from a short glass, yes... in Dallas or Fort Worth the corn tortillas look like the local ladies: wide white waists and sleepy half moon eyes, since, ticklish and cuddly, they turn their faces, and let themselves be kissed, unendingly on either end. 9 And the chit'lins, swimming and searing in broth and tabasco, and the cornbread that moaned in broiling bacon fat, is blessed where thunder rolls in wide whips, along the Mississippi,between one drink and the next, but it never surpasses a gamy partridge, savored in the dry underbrush of July, in t