At the end of Via Crosia, at least a kilometer past the Macelleria, but before the vineyards, the street’s rose cobblestone is cracked with anthills. Surely these bugs are, right now even, communing under the town, perhaps under a single block, waiting to bore holes through the bathtubs of Barolo, Italy. In one of these homes (we can only hope), someone will be washing for work—an Elena or Francesco, Valentina or Beppe—dreading the sight of silver tray, meat case, trade show badge, and tractor. By the time the ants reach the white-green tile, this person, whoever they are, will recall their breakfast if only with their throat: the buckwheat flour, egg, and water gelling inside them to spawn something entirely new.
At least a kilometer away—maybe even more—the temperature drops one degree over the grapevines and the wind brushes them into hair. The last of the colony, having just dined on a white truffle crumb, folds full and thorax-first into the anthill. Signaled from the front of the line, the last ant knows that at least a kilometer away, someone is afraid to bathe, can’t afford to fix the hole in their tile. This person, whoever they are, can not wash away breakfast’s hold, lest the ants, with the water, rise from the drain like palm fronds, slow in destroying the foundation, but surely building something—the spindle-laddered metaphysica of the flightless insect, perhaps. Yes: they rise, craving the mask of spiders, a banana tree sprouting in fast forward to bite cacti-like at the soft dough ends of Italian toes.
Breakfast will reassert itself with the fundamentals. Everything must evolve: the eggs, the hens that laid them, the naked stomach snapping back on its food, and fear. That too.
TAGS: ants, Barolo, bathtubs, breakfast, butcher shops, Eggs, evolution, insects, Italy, Matthew Gavin Frank, truffles, vineyards
 |
MATTHEW GAVIN FRANK is the author of “Barolo” (The University of Nebraska Press), a food memoir based on his illegal work in the Italian wine industry. His memoir, "Pot Farm," is due out from the University of Nebraska Press in 2012. His poetry book, "The Morrow Plots," will be published by Black Lawrence Press/Dzanc Books in 2012 as well. He is also the author of “Warranty in Zulu” (Barrow Street Press), “Sagittarius Agitprop” (Black Lawrence Press/Dzanc Books), and the chapbooks “Four Hours to Mpumalanga” (Pudding House Publications), a poetry sequence about his initial visit to his wife’s homeland in rural South Africa, and “Aardvark” (West Town Press), a poetry sequence that strangely engages the alphabet. Recent work appears in The New Republic, Field, Epoch, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, North American Review, Pleiades, AGNI, The Best Food Writing 2006, The Best Travel Writing (2008 and 2009), Creative Nonfiction, Gastronomica, Plate Magazine, and others.
To research “Barolo” Frank spent six months in Barolo, Italy (pop. 646), living out of a tent in the garden of the local Pittatore farmhouse. Through the Pittatore family, he was able to secure work picking wine grapes for famed vintner Luciano Sandrone. Through Sandrone, Frank developed relationships with the region’s families, restaurateurs, butchers, vintners, local foodstuffs, odd markets, and circus-like atmosphere in experiences both gustatory and death-defying.
Matthew Gavin Frank was born and raised in Chicago. Bitten by the food, wine, and travel bug, he left home at age seventeen, embracing the vagabond lifestyle that often lent itself to work in the restaurant industry. He ran a tiny breakfast joint in Juneau, Alaska, worked the Barolo wine harvest in Italy’s Piedmont, sautéed hog snapper hung-over in Key West, designed multiple degustation menus for Julia Roberts’s private parties in Taos, New Mexico, served as a sommelier for Chefs Rick Tramonto and Gale Gand in Chicago, and assisted Chef Charlie Trotter with his Green Kitchen cooking demonstration at the Slow Food Nation 2008 event in San Francisco. He returned to academia and received his MFA in Poetry and Creative Nonfiction from Arizona State University. He taught creative writing to undergraduates in Phoenix, Arizona, and nonfiction writing to soldiers and their families near Fort Drum in upstate New York on the Canadian border.
Frank is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, an Artist’s Grant to the Vermont Studio Center, the Sonoran Prize, and numerous grants from the Virginia G. Piper Center for the Creative Arts. Presently, he teaches creative writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.
His current favorite ice cream flavor: beet-jalapeño.
Find him at www.matthewgfrank.com |
|
Related Posts |
This entry was posted
on Monday, August 24th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
and is filed under Nonfiction, Travel.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
|
|
|
