Kate Polak

Heritage

The only sure image I have of myself, before anything else interceded,

is my mom recounting her and dad’s concern as I wept, inconsolable,

over the puddle in which a floating body of a worm drifted

in wind of another approaching storm. I can’t be the only one with stories

their parents told them too late to make a kind of sense of some inborn

weakness or grace that may not shape all the great acts of their lives,

but surely do form idle evenings, impulses towards the furred or horned

things that—for being alien—perhaps need an outlandish form of love.

Ancestors let you down: my grandmother’s gentle hands and strength

tempered by the memory I can’t escape: dating a black boy in high school,

she said I’d be disinherited if I married him. She didn’t really care—I think—

(did she?) but my grandfather’s long shadow sat hunched in a pool

of light from a lamp he made himself, over a solitaire hand in the other room.

How long will we all wait to hear him rouse. I don’t want her to be

this recollection, but there it is. Of course, it made me what I am, but slant:

my mother, more blithe and cutting than I’ll ever be, laughed, simply

remarking “Aw, Ma, you’ll be long dead by then.”

The muscle of it, a daughter being not her mother, being a woman

that looked beyond the purview of what she’d been.

Being something other than a grace, an absence.

                                                                                    Being a man.  

I wonder if that’s the line that coils to mind when she remembers

the mother that laid cool fingers on her brow, whose will was force,

who had all her hands in making what she were, and how. The common temperature

for baking three hundred and fifty degrees, the common forehead ninety eight point six—

the specific giving way to the general, and so, the threat of never knowing most.

Recipes are girds against failure, and animals, wherever we find them,

are failure ready on our lips. My grandmother’s week divided in meals: roast,

loaf, breast, and all the other parts carved up. My mother’s cream

and butter make another rhythm to the week: one in fats and acids,

tomatoes, lemons, leeks caramelized against the skin of someone none of us knew.

The dishes are my birthright, as if such a thing should be—that, passed

down, the food is heritage excluded from our blood. But, it’s always there—few

avoid the vagaries of history, wherein they clean their wide, white hands

and, shaking the water from calloused finger tips, are clean.

Kate Polak is a professor and writer. Her work has previously appeared in Plainsongs, So To Speak, In Parentheses, and elsewhere. She lives in Yellow Springs with her husband and five familiars, and has painted her house to resemble a jack-o’-lantern.