Making the Pierogi for Christmas Eve
“When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered…the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls…bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory”
― Marcel Proust
So often nostalgia is triggered
in the olfactory system, sudden tears
welling up in the kitchen
over a white onion, diced
and sweating, in a cast-iron skillet
slick with butter. Proust knew
our senses are doorways
to memory. And today, the scent
of an onion conjured a memory
of my mother, laughing
contagiously with her sister,
as they often would. A bottle
of pinot grigio unscrewed already,
to toast those passed-on
traditions of family. Her sister
is rolling out the dough
on the floured countertop
like a worn parchment map
of old-world Poland,
My mother is mashing
the potatoes with farmer’s cheese
steady as a factory piston.
She is keeping time
to Bobby Vinton, singing
roses are red, my love,
violets are blue…
Their mother, Gigi,
is cutting out circles of dough
with the rim of a beer glass,
as her generation
was taught to make do
with what they had,
and in turn, she taught this
to her own children, then
their children, and now
their children’s children too,
all of them working together
around the kitchen table
like generations of depression-
era textile workers, working
the assembly lines at Botany Mills
or Val Mode Lingerie Co.,
in 1940’s Passaic, New Jersey.
They stretch and shape
the cut swatches of dough
by hand. Pieceworkers—
stuffing, folding, crimping
the pierogi for Wigilia,
dozens and dozens of perogies
stacking up for freezing
in greased aluminum foil tins,
or laid out on tea towels
to cool, parboiled and fleshy,
like rows of irregular coin purses,
the old-fashioned kind, those
crescent shaped pouches,
with a metal ball clasp on top
like two fingers crossed
in the air for luck,
or held up to show
the closeness of sisters. The same
type of change purse
in which Gigi
kept her secret stash
of Eisenhower silver dollars
to reward the children later,
pressing a large polished coin
into each child’s palm,
for all their hard work.
While fat droplets
of condensation begin, again
to well up, then shimmer,
then streak, like fine
Christmas tinsel, down
the kitchen windowpane,
above the day’s last colander
of boiled potatoes left steaming,
in the stainless-steel sink, to drain.
Mass Cards
———— For Julie
They seem to be accumulating faster
and faster, like years— like
laminated trading cards of loss.
To throw one away,
would be to stop remembering.
So I save them all,
stash them around the house,
alone or in huddles of twos
and threes, like loved ones
gathering in the reposing room
of a funeral parlor.
A favorite aunt lying alongside
a cousin in my sock drawer.
Or in the silver bowl we keep for keys,
where my grandmother’s
Sacred-Heart-of-Jesus card testifies,
finally, to the simple math of her real age.
A buddy from college is still buried
in my leather valet tray
beneath a few coins and a class ring.
The others too, family,
dear friends, poets… all of them, pinched
between the mirror and wooden frame
above my dresser, they’re wedged-in
to form a crude memorial,
a wreath of mass cards
bordering my mortal reflection.
Sometimes, as I cinch my tie, we’ll talk
and laugh, as always— as if…
but the hardest ones, still,
can level me in an instant,
like you, little sister, at a wedding
this spring, a stowaway
for (can it be?) three years now,
when I found you
in the jacket pocket of my suit.
Walking the Labyrinth
————–—Everywhere is the center of the world.
————–—Everything is sacred.
————–—Black Elk
And what better place
———to walk amongst
——————the consecrated
stones of a labyrinth,
———than right here:
——————the axis mundi,
the precise center
———of the world, which,
——————we all know, exists
everywhere. But here,
———here, on these rough-hewn
——————bluestone slabs, each
tread, each hand-set
———tamped-down tread,
——————unfurls, a little farther,
a narrow path
———to the interior
——————before doubling back
into itself,
———like the enjambed
——————line of verse, crafted
from the sacred
———geometry of turn
——————and counterturn,
the way a serpent
———moves through
——————the thick ryegrass
and up the tangled
———surface roots
——————of the old-growth
fig tree, yes—
———yes, right here
——————in the center
of the empty field
———is the perfect place
——————to walk, at dusk,
the mandala, to enter
———the eternal carousel
——————of heavenly bodies
all orbiting something
———larger than themselves.
——————An entire cosmos
exists inside this
———petrified crop circle,
——————this ancient fingerprint
assembling planets
———like a grand bouquet
——————of circus balloons
that promises
———somehow, to deliver us
——————as we walk
on aching knees
———in search of the holy
——————temples we’ve lost,
or those we let fall
———into gentle ruin
——————within ourselves.
So, we walk
———until we are alone
——————and, at once, united
with all things
———and we become
——————the blooming
flowerhead,
———the illuminated rosette
——————of what must be
a divine awakening
———or the fever dream
——————of a double helix
raising its brilliant
———spiral staircase up,
——————toward the heavens,
from the nucleus
———of the microcosmic
——————solar system of an atom.
And so it goes:
———as above, so below;
——————as within, so without.
Yet somehow
———we know, deep
——————inside the infinite
nesting dolls
———of the heart,
——————there’s more
at work here
———than the dumb luck
——————that saves us each time
we lose, then
———rediscover each other
——————in the unicursal
turning of the path.
———It’s as if we’re all
——————tethered and circling
the omphalos.
———A phantom umbilicus
——————recoiling us,
through life’s
———mercifully recursive
——————journey, home.
Statement on collaboration: “Making the Pierogi for Christmas Eve” honors the deep tradition of collaboration and community needed to survive as immigrants transitioned from Eastern Europe to the United States between World Wars. The matriarch in the poem passed down the traditional values, customs and work ethic of the “Polish factory girls” working in textile mills to their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. This helped form religious, culinary and cultural traditions of whole families and communities by working together. To this day, in early December, my family (every generation) still gets together to make pierogi for a full day of loving, collaborative factory work for the Christmas Eve (Wigilia) celebration.
In “Mass Cards” and “Walking the Labyrinth” I explore and celebrate the eternal collaboration between worlds, between the living and the dead, and between present and past. I consult with the memory of those loved ones who have passed on but that never leave us. I have conversations with the mass cards on my mirror sometimes as if they were still here, because in many ways they are still guiding me. This collaboration deepens in Walking the Labyrinth as I explore the idea of interconnectedness and collaborating alongside of the Universe. Black Elk’s Great Vision revealed to him that the center of all things is within us and we are, all of us (and everything) sacred. We are divine co-collaborators as we create and experience the grand Universe.
Sean Nevin is the author of Oblivio Gate (Southern Illinois University Press) which won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Prize and A House That Falls (Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Prize). His honors include a Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize, and two poetry fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals including The Gettysburg Review, North American Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Ashville Poetry Review, and JAMA. He was named an honoree in The Irish Education 100 by Irish Times and his work was selected for Best American Poetry as Pick of the Week.