Jacqueline Gens is a co-founder of the New England College MFA Program in Poetry where she has been co-director since 2001. For many years she worked at the Naropa Institute and for the late poet Allen Ginsberg in NYC. Her chapbook, Primo Pensiero, with a foreword by Anne Waldman, was published in 2008 by Shivastan Press.

---------

 

 

 

 

            For Olga Paccidova Shriner (1930-1987)

 

You don’t see them at first

 until you stop and look slowly

 at loose leaves of 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 Yeti,

a Sephardic Jew from Salonika--

once my neighbor on Packer Corners Road,

To gather morels 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 soil 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 away 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 table 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 beloved collection of Americana.

She’s here in the woods now

buried over the hill on Carpenter Road

an early death from cancer at age fifty-eight.

Some years, I do remember the harvest

of wild leeks, their bitter vitality,

my mind a continuity of pungent smells and thoughts

of family, friends, survival, the old world still here

growing up on a hillside in Vermont each year---

regardless if we live or die, 

holding forth as though eternal

in a wild assembly of tenderness.  

 

 

 

At Tires for Less on Route 9

I wait to exchange snow studs

for all season tires past the April deadline--

A young skinhead,

with a spider web on his naked

elbow strips the lugs

which hit the floor as he moves on 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 indicate I'm not the first.

Two monarchs catch my attention, then flecks

 of orange move among purple cones,

 a different butterfly, with fur edges.

This day is long with light and I have time

to wonder how they know to convene

by the hundreds in this dump

oblivious to trucks and cars speeding past,

their movements counterpoint

to my own noisy impatience, calmed a moment,

until spider boy calls me over.