Gravy

Meat grease, flour and water, stirred till smooth— it’s what my forebears ate, if they were lucky.

It’s what my mother ate, those hard dark years she worked at a sawmill way out in the mountains, learning to live on cigarettes and coffee

and cold biscuits raised from the dead by gravy.

Now and then she’d cook a little for us, something to moisten and darken and quicken

the bowls of bland white rice or mashed potatoes I’d shape into a cratered volcano whose steaming lava overflow improved

everything it touched on my dinner plate.

Good gravy’s not an afterthought, a dressing, a murky cloud masking a dish’s dull prospect:

whether poured from a Thanksgiving china boat or a black iron skillet in Bloody Madison, it’s the meal’s essence, where flesh meets spirit,

where fat becomes faith, where juice conveys grace

as red-eye, giblet, sausage, faithful sawmill— whenever I think of those savory names

and the times I’ve poured or ladled or spooned then mixed and dipped and sopped up their elixir, not wanting to waste a single filling drop,

my mouth starts making its own thin gravy again.