Sky
Burial
for John Kinsella
I
really want to be fed
to
vultures when I’m dead. My toddler
on
the verge of using spoon
will
be assigned to serve, when I’m done
his
father’s cadaver, sliced and spread
to
sky’s black scavengers. Why not
–
my wife often asks – cremation
à la her desired
dissemination
of
charred fragments in the breeze
wreathing
a mountain range? I answer
and
confess. To a lifetime of feasting
on
birds. (She’s baffled, a vegetarian
alien
to guilt accumulated
in
the gullet of a carnivore hooked
on
the thighs, breast and wings
of
the avian.) A concatenation
of
culinary memories. Chicken
kebab:
grilled squares stabbed
onto
a bayonet-like skewer
at
my uncle’s wedding just before
the
War. Poultry so scarce in Tehran
the
viscous taste became a hunger
for
an end to Saddam’s bombing raids
and
when Mum did somehow bring home
a
frozen, beige clump and cooked us
khoresht baadenjan with
morgh
the
other three in the family gave me
–
without my comprehending
the
complexity of their munificence –
all
the tender, fatless, skinless fillets
and
I devoured. When we finally fled
the
acerbic scent (‘secret herbs, spices’)
of
cheap deep-fried flesh, vital
emblem
of the American empire
galvanised
my senses upon arrival
in
Australia. Chiko Rolls at the tuck shop
(made
with mutton, I later discovered,
despite
the name) diverted, occasionally
from
the howls – “Speak English!
Say
something, camel fucker!” – and then
smoking
with a surfie dope-dealer
who
worked at Red Rooster between art
classes
at university. I lived off
bread,
baked beans and starchy noodles
but
for a treat – to recover
from
rejections by girls, ridicule by lecturers
who
found my thoughts and paintings
pointless
– I’d resort to a sodden
marked
down BBQ chook
wilting
below the deli counter, late
at
night in a Gold Coast supermarket
biting
the singed bird’s sinews
with
terrible anger. Finally I left
for
Melbourne to ‘make it’ as a poet
and
to locate a hypothetical woman
who’d
tolerate me. When I did find her
I
also found (to my gastronomic
terror)
she was a vegetarian. The end
of
my fetish for feathered beasts? Hardly
could
you call her a proselytiser
but
what a traveller. Honeymoon
in
Vietnam: tofu tossed with lemongrass
for
her, pieces of quails and other murdered
birds
decked my chopsticks. In China
I
struggled to order without
embarrassment
at the restaurants
since
‘chicken’ in Mandarin
distanced
by one tonal accent from
‘prostitute’.
And so on. Tavuk
shish
kebabs in Istanbul, turkey strips
(ersatz
bacon) in Dubai. Can this
addiction
be assuaged by the virtues
of
ethical consumerism, barnyard
fowls?
My wife looks away. The truth
hurts
even more because what’s wasted
on
feeding me meat becomes heat
and
melts the world. And I had
a
pet rooster once, regal with his red crown
fierce
after the targeted killing of my
sister’s
speckled hen by one of Tehran’s
infamous
crows. I can still hear
my
rooster’s sad, lonesome howl
creep
out of his quivering beak
when
I enjoy murgh tikka masala (or shamefully
for
an anti-capitalist, a Zinger). I cringe
past
the glistening corpses of Beijing ducks
but
my mouth moistens. So please
a
secular sky burial for me. A machete
doing
the work of maggots’ teeth
on
my dead body. And proffer the chops
to
the vultures to apologise for a lifetime
of
eating their kind. Aquiline beaks
tearing
morsels of my muscles
and
then tenderised and regurgitated
for frenetic, squawking chicks.
