Jed Feffer's poem, The Archetypal Recipe

The Archetypal Recipe                                                        

Jed last summer

Swirling pink and green cupids

aiming arrows on the candy dish cover.          

Moth balls packed around the clothes

in the walk in closets.

Leaves banked against the garage,

The sweet smell of age inside

where bicycles, skates and tires sat.

An upholstered green Pontiac

with colorful red and chrome Chief

bonneting the hood.

A backseat of dust motes

and grey velvet cushions

as the motor purred down the street.

Walks in Forest Park Zoo

where bears snorted Wonderbread,

and chimps swayed in the urine laced air.

Trips to the X where we entered

the Bijou for a quarter

to see Steve Reeves demolish

the Temples of the Infidels.

Coming back to the small

bricked ranch on Shawmut Avenue

with balsa wood rubber banded aircraft,

and paddles fitted with tiny pink balls

attached to very long elastic strings.

These were the recipes of childhood

at Bubbie's and Grandpa Jake's.

These were the lunches of fried fish

heavy with oil and onions.

Kreplach, meat filled Jewish dumplings,

swimming in chicken broth;

Lokshen, noodle puddings,

filled with butter and cottage cheese;

fricassee'd chicken  with tiny golden mushrooms.

Cold gefilte fish swimming in carrots and gelatin

served with bright beet horseradish.

Blintzes bursting with cheese and covered

in sour cream and berries;

Apple strudel with walnuts and raisins;

Poppy seed Hamentashen and

cinammon nut rugelach.

Bubbie, dressed in her nightgown

sipping coffee without her teeth,

and doling it out to us, her grandchildren.

Grandpa, reading the Yiddish paper

with his black rimmed glasses,

looking like Nikita Kruschev.

The children lined up to get Chanukah gelt,

or answering the primeval Passover question:

"Why is this night different from all other nights?"

All recipes for familial warmth.

Mrs. Rispler coming from across the street

proclaiming, "Molly, so when did they get here??"

Bubbie hovering around the room like a giant dreidal

ladling, cutting, lifting, smiling,

and later when the questions would arise

over this recipe or that one,

she would plead ignorance,

happy to keep the mystery of her power alive.

"Just put a little of this with eine bissel of that, 

you know!" And of course we didn't.

We would be affectionately kept enthralled

by the recipes and the routines

never fully grasping the logic beneath the myth.

The plums ripening fully green and fully ripe

in the center of the yard,

the tree like some symbol of the first Eden

growing smack dab in the middle of the 

little ranch house lot on Shawmut Avenue.

Bubbie forever aproned; Grandpa forever smiling;

Recipes for male and female,

for light and dark,

for family and belonging.

Forever enshrined in the little rooms of our hearts.

Jed Feffer
Greensboro, Vermont
January 2, 2019

Jed Feffer seated on the left, not at his
grandparents' place on Shawmut Avenue but at
the Wednesday Poets' (first ever) Winter Gathering