PoemsCampbell’s Tomato SoupSave this storySave this storySave this storySave this storyBegin with the flavor, which is not rank but insipid.Made with water it tastes of a rusty farmyard pump,made with milk it resembles melted vinyl in a panyet veers too closely toward its cousin, tomato sauce,in all its richer culinary regalia, to say nothingof that lordly fruit disguised as a vegetable,the selfsame tomato in its myriad shapely tropes.The larger question is existential: why soup?As a snack it’s too much, too fussy, a hassle.As a meal it leaves you hanging, perplexed.Certainly, I have sampled delicious soups in my day—split pea in Les Halles in the autumn of 1985,a tureen of Tibetan lentil-and-potato chowderafter escaping a blizzard in Durango, Colorado—but when I summon the flavor of Campbell’s soupI am propped on pillows with a terrible cough,home from school watching game shows on TV.Soup is a peasant artifact steadily vanishingfrom our lives, as illustrated in the financial sectionby the travails of the Campbell Soup Company,their offerings rejected by the modern marketplaceas drab, old-school, too salty, out of touch,though for me the problem remains the name.Despite its ubiquity Campbell poses a phonetic puzzle,mysteriously pronounced, hard to spell,derived from Scots Gaelic, meaning crooked mouth.Hmm, why crooked—was it the soup?The only compensatory value I’ve receivedfor sharing a moniker with its iconic red-and-white canis when ordering takeout food over the phone,at which time I invariably give my name as“Campbell—like the soup.”For decades a foolproof formula, a passkey,a universal monad like Elvis or Shakira,but now it elicits a head shake. Cannonball? Chimbu?Once, I arrived to pick up spring rolls and pad Thaito find myself mislabelled Gumbo—like the soup!Better, these days, to be christened Goya, or Warhol.But time marches onward, tastes change,corporate empires rise and fall and each passing yearmore of us live in happy ignoranceof this paradigmatic meme of twentieth-century Americana,blossoming generations for whom tomato soupmight as well be tomato aspic,while I continue torn between gauzycinematic phantoms of the pastand live-streamed promises for the future.One last story: the other WednesdayI stopped on the way to workto pick up a sandwich from a vintage delicatessenwhere the ancient woman at the counter,her skin translucent as parchment paper,stapled the receipt to a bagand asked me,“Campbell—like the soup?”Yes indeed! “Are you related?” Sadly not.“You know,” she said, “I grew up in Camden, New Jersey,and the farmers used to line up day and nightall summer longin trucks full of tomatoesat the gates of the Campbell’s factorywith those big brick smokestacks gushing steam—it was a long, long time agobut I still remember the delicious smellof tomato soup on every block in the neighborhood.”