Tumerica

Oh, how I’d love to go back to Bologna. Stylish, uber-chic, ultra-socially concious, sexy, mind-numbingly delicious Bologna, with it’s kilometers and kilometers of LOGGIA—those covered porticos with columns that make for lovely strolling and exploring. Midieval, college town, with tens of thousands of college kids strolling, asking questions, making fun things to do for everyone, free concerts and movies in the piazzas, lectures, performances, pasticceria with roasted, marinated artichoke hearts, and eggplants. Ahhh, Bologna!

Nay-ash-vee-el

Great mound of greasy-gratifying

Southern-fried chicken,

Country-fried steaks

Piled, steaming with

Heartbreaking sweet corn pudding and

Bread pudding huddled under a tan blanket

Of caramel sauce

Sweet tea, lemon punch,

And the chef comes to the table

Greasy-aproned and grinning,

Explaining she refused to cook today

Unless they let her make

Salty, hog-jowl–anointed

Green beans, which I ate

Three helpings’ worth

Thankee kindly, for the

Sliding steel guitar

Soulful susurrus and the

Bone-skewering

Caterwauling of a gutsy

Beautiful singer

Pouring 20 years of

Country heartache

From operatic room-filling

Lungs while pulling real tears

Straight from my eyes

Into my Peach Daiquiri

For the good times

Meanwhile, would you pass

The biscuits, please, sir?

And some fried cabbage in a plastic bowl,

Shards of catfish and coleslaw,

B-B-Q pork ribs, saucy and sweet

Like the server who ribs us

And winks slyly as though we were cousins,

Who hung out at the Dairy Queen and

Sloshed, jeans rolled up

Into the crawdad hole

On stuffy-rich summer evenings

That drawled like the

Cicadas and peepers

Accompanying our foray

Of disequilibrium at the Opryland hotel,

That humungous glass spaceship

That looks like it landed on a tropical garden

That sprouted, oh,

Forty football fields’ worth of

Rooms in Southern glory

But where are the grits and gravy,

Robert E. Lee?

I wondered for the

Hundredth time

While I helped myself to more

Sweet tea to cool my insides

From the thick air and help me smile

At the strangers in a Bluegrass band called

New Ground who said

Y’all buy our CD now,

Y’hear? Or we won’t have

The gas money to get home

But they were being sold

Inside the Grand Ol’ Opry, and

I didn’t have a ticket, plus

It shore looked sold out to me

So I’ll get one later

To send good juju and

Keep ‘em tossing up those

Easy harmonies and standing

Bass notes thumping

With tingly banjo pickings

Into the balmy blue,

Inhaled by generations

Of pride-bound

True Southerners from

William Blount (my ancestor) to

Davy Crockett to Al Gore

(Though they didn’t vote for

their home-state boy),

And the modern Tennessee

Of the shiny-floored

Circular mall with the
NASCAR simulator and

The Apple Barn inside,

And don’t miss the world-classy

Hyper-intellectual architecture

Of the Bicentennial Park

Stretching like a hieroglyph

In front of the Parthenon

Capital building on a hill

With living history explained

In dazzling geometrical splendor,

And decorated with fact in

Times Roman type, not far from

The gritty rough side that was

Way friendlier than it looked as

We drove to two stores

Searching for those elusive grits

We finally found

And took a little bit of Nashville

Home with us.