Sturm

Sturm über Kloster-Sulz - Storm in Kloster-Sulz 38,5 x 28,5 cm

REAL  AMERICAN

You cannot really dance to Bach or Bartok

and, for reasons of decorum and such, probably shouldn’t 

but once or twice a year we pump up the volume on Grand Funk

Railroad’s “American Band” and dance patriotically across   

the badly warped complaining floors of our Berlin apartment. And

I do have an urge, irrational because impossible to satisfy, for a Chicago

Steak n’ Cheese sandwich plastered with mustard and primed with pickle

   and which, oozing over its edges,

is pierced through the heart with a three-inch tooth pick.

But wait. I’m not finished. I would like

to purchase this culinary masterpiece from a window on Columbus Avenue,

Little Italy, San Francisco, USA and eat it while drifting through

the fog of a July evening.

I want to stand in the parking lot outside Pete’s in Berkeley

on a Saturday morning

and listen in on the conversation of coffee-sipping

anthropology professors and hung-over poets who are no where

in residence, and so please forgive me Peoria (which is ubiquitous) and Tupulo, 

Miss. (hey, Elvis!) and Bulldog, Alabama home to some of the meanest

                       motherfuckers in the Confederacy but above all

Killgore, Texas(O Janice, where art thou in our moment of need, which is always?) in fact

anywhere in Texas, hardscrabble as it gets, and Oklahoma too and gosh darn

   Arkansas as well,  

for wanting to do these most un-American of real things.   

Bach - Cello Suite No. 1 - Prelude

Mischa Maisky