United States Of Barbecue

Mud Creek, Dreamland, Twixt-n-Tween,
the cue-joints rise through smoke
and glow like roadhouses on Heaven’s way.
Or so the local gospels raise them,
each tongue ready to map the ramshackle
of shacks and houses, secret windows
and business-sector hip in some new
geography of truth. If the meek shall,
then a rib-mobile may shame the fixed pit
in a reading from the book of skill,
the grill-less one cook himself to legend
rib by rib. The great chain’s links
are live and hermetic as bone
and where cue burns hotter than politics,
every mouth’s the forge of change,
all scholars temporary and self-proclaimed.
One says he half-sublimes each time he eats
a rib and expects to go in a puff of smoke
when he finds the perfect pig:
he wanders like a ghost, his eyes
trying everything, a genuine R & D,
and once a day he proclaims the latest find,
a homegrown Moses canting
a vernacular Talmud changeable as wind.
A word could crumble him, some backyard
master slapping mustard on a country rib
to turn the state of things entire. So every word reverberates and mystery’s
sown again. Rib or rump, dry-rub or ketchup,
the eternal terms turn and barbecue’s rooted
or pulled anew. Theories proliferate
like flies after rain, but that’s the usual business
where Georgia and the Carolinas river in,
the wind spirits Mississippi or Carib,
and piedmont’s melted to the uplands
in open hearths and coke ovens, stitched tight
in cotton fields, and a kudzu vine’s
the proper compass. Beef or pork,
catfish, quail or armadillo,
we’ve tried it all, loved it with brushes,
iss of vinegar, tongue of flame,
so whatever it may not be,
we’ve covered all it is, Vegetarian
exception opens eggplant, means tofu’s
the next horizon, purity an envelope
that’s always opening, So summer afternoons
and Saturdays when the fires go up,
some rised to a signal and shapes
the singe common word,
hand-make silence talking on every tongue.