Recipe

Everything before has come to this,

careful settings and a gracious banquet.

We spent the days laying out the plan: roast 

turkey dressed with sage, orange, cloves; sauteed

Brussels sprouts with red onion; bread dressing 

with sausage and thyme; rutabaga (mashed);

cranberry chutney evolved through years of 

family tables. Outside, wet leaves drape 

the earth in colors of roast turkey and 

sweet potatoes. Men gather at the screen

for sports, not news. We’ve had enough of that 

this year, we agree. Aunt brings the sweetened

casserole, different each year. Worries 

of her job, her health, children’s grades and their 

latest misbehaviors, all mask her pride 

in them. They smile indulgently, roll their 

eyes. Mum brings the maligned cream corn, not so 

bad really, but an object of myth. Her 

years of aches and pains are annual sides. 

Uncle brings jokes and cigars, bottle of 

bourbon this year (scotch last), he wears this last

year of age like ten or twenty. Grandma, 

grandpa, and ghosts of all who have made this 

table before evoke unexpected 

memories from the linen and grayed plates. 

At the table prayer is said, wine poured and 

turkey carved, the children dance like powdered

sugar. Thank You for this sacred chaos. 

Amen.


--c. 2011, by Martin A. Bartels (working draft)

Anya and the Glass Bowl

At the picnic, Anya (of Russian descent),

you told me how much the simple glass mixing

bowl meant to you, that it had once belonged to

babka, and at once I saw her aged hands and

wooden spoon working the pirozhki dough:

flour, baking powder and salt (a hefty pinch),

butter, eggs, and the secret ingredient—

sour cream. Or maybe I saw my own

grandmother’s hands (of French lineage),

dusted in flour for cookies or dinner rolls

as I perched on the back step pinching chives from

her simple garden. Turning over the green,

urgent sapor on my tongue, oblivious

to the fact that the moment was formative

somehow, would one day become a dear memory:

A flavor profile forecasting my own love

of cooking. At the picnic you peeled off

the cellophane, revealed a simple slaw:

cabbage shredded fine, dressing airy and

sour-sweet, I don’t know how you made it though I

must have asked for the recipe, just as

I no longer know how I ended up with the

bowl. I said I’d take it home for you, sure we’d

meet again. We never did. For years I

kept it hidden from harm imagining that

one day you might knock on my door and I would

hug you, say yes, I have your bowl. I’ve kept it well.  

You never knocked. Finally, last night, I pulled

it from its secret place, its tinted walls

thickened by layers of the weight of time,

began to chop carrots, onions, celery;

the start of a fine beef stew. Left unused the

bowl was emptier, somehow vacant, a

condition our grandmothers never would have

tolerated. Now filled it reminds me of

you. You spoke of sacred Russian icons

decorating whitewashed church walls and your

memories of childhood, playing p’yanitsa

in the haze of your uncle’s smoke, glass bowl

full then of tastes you could never replicate.

--c. 2011, Martin A. Bartels (working draft)

Common side effects may also include...

“Tired” will lose meaning and you 

will no longer know how to answer a 

simple “How are you?”

You may wake up and experience a

sudden hunger for silence,

noise, or distant places.

Things may take on their true size.

You will temporarily forget what matters.

You will revisit an old faith or invent a new one.

There is a kind of dementia that temporarily

spreads to your loved ones. We hear voices

in our heads that aren’t always kind.

You told me you hear them, too.

Streetlights may spontaneously dim

or light up when you pass.

The deconstruction of your marriage,

the reconstruction of your love,

the unbearable kindness of strangers,

but inevitably, also, the

unbearable strangeness of kindness.

--c. 2011, Martin A. Bartels (working draft)

Encounter

The women sat beside me, casually intimate, clearly 

together, each a glass of wine and sharing a 

charcuterie plate; the insouciance of meat, the 

pale pate, shaved speck a marbled red, the dark 

lamb sausage lusty and earthen, yellow mustard, 

rustic bread. I couldn’t help but notice what was 

unsaid in the white margins and unpainted spaces

of their presence. I began to sketch her secretly, 

ink scratches really, the shocking blonde, the poised 

way she slipped into her barstool, her fashionable shawl 

tracing the shape of her body as the arm of a friend 

draped over her shoulder, an unconscious comfort. 

Each part of her clothing held a pattern, net tights

flowing from Burberry-plaid skirt, rope cable sweater,

and the shawl, pale blue knit, loose tassels so that

in motion she was only motion, your eyes couldn’t

rest in a single place for long, stealth clothing. 

Farmers once sealed the wood of barns from

rusted cans of linseed oil, sometimes blended with the 

spilled blood of livestock. The resulting tint dried a

ruddy brown-red, a fabric that became rural decor,

barns now signposts between farmland neighbors.

We reveal ourselves through social camouflage,

the weave of our histories etched in sacred origami. 

--c. 2011 Martin A. Bartels (working draft)