Kruegar's Cooking Meat Again Poem by Ronald Baatz

Kruegar's cooking meat again.
Kruegar's room is between mine
and Murray's. Right now Murray
is in intensive care with heart failure,
so at least he will not have to put up
with Kruegar cooking meat all afternoon
and on into the evening. No, it is left
to me alone to smell this abomination.
The fumes get so bad when Kruegar's
cooking meat that the parking lot fills
with them. It's unbelievable. And
to think that Kruegar is to be here for
the entire summer is a frightening thought.
The only saving grace in all this is that
Kruegar cooks meat no more than twice a week.
My god, as I sit here typing I can detect
the fumes coming through the motel wall.
Kruegar, he has no mercy when he cooks meat.
Sometimes Murray and I will try to determine,
by the strength of the fumes alone, exactly how big
the piece of meat might be that Kruegar's cooking.
We always come to the same conclusion: that
a full grown cow would not be too far off the mark.
And poor Murray, he gets it worse than I do since
the wall between his room and Kruegar's is even
thinner than the wall between Kruegar's and mine.
One time I went into Murray's room when Kruegar
was cooking meat and I found Murray slumped over
in a chair, mumbling to himself. Over and over
he kept asking, why why why was Kruegar
cooking one damned piece of meat for so long?
How could there be anything left to it? How
could any decent human being stand the smell
of an animal cooking for so many endless hours?
And what drove Murray even more insane
was the fact that this Kruegar person, this
neighbor who had been forced upon us, never
invited anyone to share his overcooked meat.
And it never seemed to do any good to cook
one's own piece of meat since it never quite
had the same stink that Kruegar's meat had.
This was the harrowing irony, I guess: hating
the fumes and the stink of Kruegar's meat yet
at the same time wanting to sit down at his table
and share it with him, share in its overwhelmingly
powerful presence on earth, and being done with it.

Woodstock/1986