Year of the Fire Pig

Greetings for Year of the Fire Pig

“...and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,"
Hamlet, IV vii 170

What’s not to reconsider in grosser terms?
Disarrays— a casual display of hungers
unabated or stout limbs to follow long afternoons
in nothingness where we dally no where
to the larger world of perfections. or split hairs
of judgement. Let’s not forget that our design
is on the other side of civility--
Cracked open: a hue of fruit, its juice
rooting our place in the cosmos,
only to settle on the bud with a taste of eternity.
It’s the long purple we stroke into being:
Wild snouts aflame,
urgent FIRE PIGS
with noses to the ground
searching for the root.

Jacqueline Gens
Brattleboro, Vermont
February 19, 2007

Visiting Tzintsunzan

[Photo of the Growing Christ at Tzintsunzan]

Visiting Tzintsunzan

for Tsultrim Allione

"Rely, not on the Nethartha (indirect meaning/language) but on
Nithartha (direct menaing/experience)," the Buddha said.


The place where fire ends, marked in bronze, said gods
attained the human realm outside the village of Tzinsunzan.

It's just a minor ediface, in a field of megaliths along Lake Patzcuaro,
where Perepecha still cast handmade nets from dug-out canoes.

The place where fire ends rises as light in absence of struggle
from "Conque asi es la famosa civilizacion Humana"

painted on a scroll in the small dog's mouth on another church wall,
now turned library dedicated to Gertrude Botenegra and Mexico.

But here in Tzinsunzan where the growing Christ
lies encased in glass with a toy fire engine swathed next

to his body-- dust motes move toward the sun.
A simple AH, that's all there is, you once said.

Patzcuaro, Mexico

Wild Leeks

Wild Leeks

by Jacqueline Gens

You don’t see them at first
till you stop and look
slowly at the loose leaves
and winter debris
scattered across the forest floor.
After awhile, tufts of greenery emerge,
thousands of tender shoots ,
still too early to pick.
This is the method I learned from Yettie--
Sephardic Jew from Salonika--
once my neighbor on Packers Corner Road.
To gather morrels one year, we sat on
the ground until we noticed our field of vision
shifting to nascent specks of white.
She's here because of her grandfather's second sight
reading in tea leaves that things
were not as they seemed.
They left the dinner table, food half eaten,
for distant Aegean Isles surviving the war
because of his divinations.
The real miracle-- year after year
the leeks grow only in this one place.
Each spring, I try to remember
Their irony taste, drawn from deep humus,
decayed pine, juniper, crushed maple leaves,
moss, and rotted wood--
Often, I forget the wild leeks of Keats Brook Road
I can't remember how we ended up
in this New England neighborhood—
my mother, Olga (like Yettie), worlds from her native Shanghai
where bombs fell, first from Japanese then American planes
as she rode her bicycle through the city
to collect bread rations from the Jewish ghetto.
Her heroic stories our dinner conversation for decades—
We knew that daily ride through fear: sounds, smells,
her chronic hunger, the blown up bits of pregnant women and children
"It’s the shrapnel that kills you, you know, not the bombs."
We allowed her the telling over and over
surrounded by her collection of Americana.
She’s here in the woods now
buried over the hill on Carpenter Road,
Some years, I do remember the harvest
of wild leeks with their bitter vitality,
my mind a continuity of pungent smells and thoughts:
family, friends, survival, the old world still here
growing on a hillside in Vermont each year---
regardless if we live or die,
holding forth as though eternal
in a wild assembly of tenderness.

IO & others

Some recent spring poems


IO


Twice, I imagined her name called, once
when my lover came to visit, and then again,
in the root cellar where I strained in the dark
to listen among potatoes and onions.

Twice daily, I called out to her-- I O
toward the back pasture from which she came running
to enter the barn and charge into her stanchen
awaiting hay, and that greater reward, grain.

I squatted on a three-legged stool
tipping forward, my face pressed into her Jersey flank,
right forearm barring her feisty kicks
while I massaged hard udders to let down her milk.

Each time I heard or said her name,
I thought of that other cow driven insane
by furies when thoughts assailed my mind of L.
making me crazy--

Until a tension released itself through her milk’s flow
as I grasped two tits and the warm stream
poured out into the stainless steel bucket
and we both came into Egypt-- I, out of despair.

***


The Lilac Thief


This year I looked for lilacs
off the beaten track
in yards no longer tended –
It's in those forgotten places,
abandoned lots littered with debris,
broken shards and plastic bottles,
I find the deeper purple of old bushes--
their crushed bloomets falling into my arms
I snap from gnarled branches, the night already moist.
No one notices their heritage
plumage mingled with the weeds of choke
grass and mulberry stands grown unruly--
except for the local lilac thief,
that one, who stops to follow
the scent of unseen blossoms.

***

Nearing Summer Solstice


At Tires for Less on Route Nine
while waiting to exchange snow studs
for all season tires past the April deadline
--vehicle housekeeping--
A young skin head
with spider web surrounding his naked
elbow, strips each lug
which hits the floor as he moves on his haunches,
feral menace with a drill bit.
I pace the pavement
looking down at the Connecticut River.
At the edge of blacktop next to a field of low
lying wildflowers and scrub brush,
broken glass and butts. Two
monarchs catch my attention, then flecks
of orange move among purple cones,
a different butterfly, with fur edges.
This day is long and suddenly I have time
to wonder how it is they know to convene
in this dump by the hundreds--
oblivious of trucks and cars speeding past,
their movements counterpoint
to my noisy irritation, calmed a moment
until spider boy calls me over.


Jacqueline Gens