Borscht

Thinking back now, this is the essential fact: how little I understood.  My mother’s parents emigrated from a small town near Odesa in what was then Czarist Russia—land we know today as Ukraine.  After my grandfather died, Grandma Frieda came to live with us and it was, sad to say, an uneasy relationship.  She was distinctively ‘old world,’ and her more traditional ways were, at times, uncomfortable to my young sister and me—much as our boisterous sense of independence, fostered in the 1960’s, must have seemed incomprehensible to her. I remember some afternoons, while my mother was at work, watching Frieda cooking alone in the kitchen—peasant fare like gribenes and borscht (dishes she alone enjoyed).  We were finicky eaters, and these foods seemed unappealing, alien.  Yet watching her at the counter—deftly peeling the beets, or stirring the onions in the skillet—I was never sure if I was witnessing deep joy or abject loneliness.  Preparing these familiar dishes, was this an effort at reclaiming history?  Of mourning a lost way of life?  Both?  And why wasn’t I brave enough to accept a proffered spoonful?  So as I observed the protagonist in Denise Bergman’s new poem, I was filled with a range of conflicting emotions.  This speaker, too, seems to be experiencing a mixture of sensual passion and subconscious terror as she prepares the beet soup.  And as the imagery builds, I got to experience what I feel is one of the essential pleasures in reading poetry: being led by a confident authorial voice, but traveling blind; the mind sparks, anticipating what will be unveiled in the next line, and the next.

From the outset, I was a little stunned by “The beet’s heartless/heart” staining the cook’s fingers and palms—the scene feeling closer to abattoir than dinner prep. To think of that humble root vegetable as a “Quartered throbbing beast” is to inject a certain unexpected violence into the family kitchen.  A Julia Child cooking demonstration this is most certainly not.  Still, the poem remains, ostensibly, about cooking—isn’t it?  “Peeled skin splatters the unforgiving/ formica counter”—and the word ‘unforgiving’ takes us across an imaginative Rubicon into dangerous territory.  There is unspoken grievance involved here, violations that may never be assuaged.  But with the next stanza—“Slips of lung, slivers of bone”—we must accept that these are the ingredients of terror.  A far cry from the culinary, it appears that nightmare is included in this recipe—and pain must be swallowed.  I remembered when, as a child, I first overheard the word pogrom in the grown-ups’ conversation.  I learned that, like the red beets, language leaves its mark.  This cook’s experience may be more contemporary—but, after all, just a quick glance at the daily headlines brings enough grief into the home to upset even the most stolid of sensibilities.  There is some trauma being exposed on the cutting board, but we each are left to personalize the details.  All we know is this: there aren’t enough disinfectants in this household (in the world?) to obliterate the stain.  “Not salt, spit, bleach”—and perhaps not even the scouring cleanser that is poetry.

Denise is the author of five books of verse which, among other things, illuminate the role of women in the vast American experiment. The Shape of the Keyhole, for example, takes place during one week in 1650 as a falsely accused woman awaits her hanging.  A Woman in Pieces Crossed a Sea explores the ways that the Statue of Liberty has come to embody our democratic ideals.  This poet’s work has long been centered on the power of language to foster community.  She conceived of and edited City River of Voices, an anthology of urban poetry; and the first lines of her poem “Red,” about a neighborhood near a slaughterhouse, are permanently installed in a public park in Cambridge, MA.  Her writing, for me, often becomes a conduit into a deeper examination of otherness and emotional commonality. Reading “Borscht”, I was reminded of how little I understood then—or now—about the inner lives of even those closest to me.  But that only underscores the essential value of poetry. Literature as a whole can be seen as a kind of cumulative crowd-sourced investigation of life on this planet and its connections with human consciousness.  Every poem allows me to experience language and imagination from perspectives beyond my own, even transcending cultures and historical eras.  As I write this, I feel myself engulfed by the smell of cooked beets—rising from memory, from Denise’s carved stanzas.  Painful as it may be, a poem like this nourishes, sustains.