There are so many types
of vinegar here—serious
shades of spiteful grapes:
balsamic, rice, white wine,
red [red red] wine, & apple
cider. And in these
thoughtfully commercialized
woods there is cherry everything
everything except for cherry
vinegar and it makes me want
to want it
even more.
It’s 2 a.m.
and I am about to start making bigos
and I think of my father,
who would have died
if 39 years a chef had sprouted 40
and I hear his weighted tongue
grumble thunder—tell me I use too much
meat and I lose myself in reverie:
the days he worked at Blackhawk
tannery
as Stanisław (“Stan”) Guziewicz
skipping his lunch break
to leave early so he could
go sterilize the IRS
building
at night
and how he took scraps
of deer hide to make
gloves for the man
in Manhattan
while also
tidying
some asshole’s
neatly mown suburb
on the side;
then I dream of the irony—
not of the obvious one—
working cleaning
up the IRS—
its emerald halls of shattered
pencils—
with a cousin’s SSI card,
but that I now get
to make bigos
with too much
meat
and money
on a peninsula
at a residency
at 2 a.m.
for a week
so far
from the condominiums
that sprout violently
from the ashes
of those wind-crumbled tanneries
on Milwaukee’s embezzled
South Side—
the Third and Fifth Wards
all glimmering
with someone else’s
labor.
And I know
that
Władysław is my real father,
but I should also
be grateful
for Stan.
for A.S.
you aren’t even here,
but I still want to show off—
to taunt the outlines of my bones
over Death’s Door passage swooping
over Wisconsin’s shriveled thumb.
I never actually collapsed.
////// //////
Bringing two-tree
onions to an onion
farm is a sign
of a cornucopic
kind
of friendship.
////// //////
I made bordelaise at your BBQ on School House Rock beach
and somehow I thought it made no sense,
but it did!; filled my mosquito-bitten spirit
to see you, to recognize your shadow,
to know poems still fill your head
even if labor hoards your hands,
to know your family is happy
to know happy,
to know endings have only beginnings
when a friend is still a friend
even after so much wind, marsh,
forest, and time between us.
////// //////
and I sit on the ferry homeward
chasing the moon
that I’ll never catch
without the full support
of the lighthouse
I am a wreck
////// //////
But there’s folks out there
(friends) who can pick
you up, who can snap
you out of the besotted
sorrow in which you used to fall
asleep—to remind you to keep poems
////// //////
rare
but never write them
reluctantly.
These poems were written at and with the generous support of the Write On! Door County writer’s residency.
Peter Burzyński, PhD recently returned to Milwaukee from Košice, Slovakia where he served as a Fulbright Scholar. His first full-length book of poetry, Infinite Zero, is forthcoming from Writ Large Press. He is the son of immigrants who call him on the phone every day.
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