Poem: Sauerkraut

Everything about it is rank, vulgar, echt—
which is why I love it so much: the opened jar
frankly reeking of compost, the tang of forbidden salt
and gastric sour in these limp and worm-colored shreds
of unspeakable cabbage, which I close my eyes to devour.
Home-canned, of course: who would be the snobbish knave
to let such a legacy die? Each October,
a sauerkraut séance with my earthy ancestors—
the heirloom slicer still keen enough to add
a little protein of fingertips to the batch, no problem;
the pure-white stuff mounding in the hand-me-down crock,
to be tenderly bruised with my grandfather’s baseball bat—

And then, the anointing with salt, precisely three tablespoons
to five pounds of cabbage, according to oral tradition—
once I followed a recipe in a book that specified
ten times too much salt, so much for literacy
in things that matter. Then all hands thrust stinging
into the mass for the final kneading and mixing,
the coaxing of the juices out and the salt in,
with a wordless prayer for the circumambient angels
of fermentation to descend now and enter in,
and in six weeks change this cabbage to kraut, amen.

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