From the damp, cob webbed, roach-carcassed
thrumming eternal neon twilight,
their metallic encasement gleamed
like the collective alien glow of dormant pods
awaiting a subsonic signal of eonically timed resuscitation.
A sleep-deprivation induced wanderlust
yielded this cache in the perfect oubliette,
the subbasement of my college dorm.
Walled behind boxes of used punch cards
and remnants of orgy deconstructed sofas,
the containers had been labeled, ten years earlier,
“Civil Defense All Purpose Survival Crackers, June 1962.”
I appropriated several boxes
in defiance of that particular grim future scenario
where Aesop’s ant snuggled down in his coffin shelter
then generated enough smug saliva
to masticate the sawdust textured,
dust and borax flavored wafers,
while grasshoppers like myself
racheted out a grim tune of resignation
to the suicidal exposure of an unimaginable
and ultimately inevitable
unsurvivable slow death nuclear winter.
(This was when “The Bang”
still seemed a more likely
exit scenario than “The Whimper”.
Now, I suppose, it’s a hung jury.)
Most of my friends who were beneficiaries
of these monolithic contraband totems
reassigned them as stools or 2×4 props,
an aesthetic variation on cinder block shelving.
But a gustatorily calloused few -
Like the guy who once romanced me
over to his place for dinner,
tenderly rendered “Martha My Dear”
on the squeaky nylon strings of his accoustic guitar,
rinsed green slime from a package of hot dogs
and stewed them in watered-down ketchup
on a hot plate for the main course -
Or the friend, already alarmingly thin and exophthalmic
from a hyperthyroid condition,
who sublet the greasiest corner of a garage
from the local biker club
after his parents kicked him out of the house
when he dropped out of college -
They actually innovated techniques to betray their palates
into the belief that survival crackers were edible.
This involved the crumbs of these crackers
stirred into more ketchup soup
and the contraband mucky contents
of food service grape jam packets
troweled over them, respectively.
I remember “duck and cover” rehearsal
in tight fetal posture under my metal school desk in 1962,
the nuns had piously instructed us
to place our hands over our heads
by miming the technique on their black veiled wimples.
A few months later they implored us
to kneel in front of those same desks
to pray for the soul of John F. Kennedy,
this time with our palms pressed together.
In 1962, I could no more imagine heaven than nuclear impact
much less worry about the possibility
of survival past an expiration date of crackers -
the more familiar ones in their wax paper shrouds
were immediate victims of humidity
in our ineptly winterized shoreline cottage.
Today the grasshopper suspects that a knack for survival
may be irrelevant to expiration dates,
duck and cover rehearsals and hedged-cracker bets
that pantomime civil foresight.
The talent may have nothing to do
with that idealized “will to survive” imperative at all
but, rather, the adaptive improvisation
to rinse the mold off of foodstuffs,
to make an imaginary tent over an imaginary wimple,
and when winter rimes the field in frost,
and there IS only ketchup,
the grasshopper ladles out ketchup soup.
“Martha, my dear,don’t forget me.”
