Cutlery, Etc
- Cutlery, Etc
there’s something about a great big troublesome dinner where you use all your good stuff put boards in the table find a cloth pure white to cover it all— gather the parts, the silver, the crystal, the china his family’s huge European fish knives soup spoons with heft of a server weapon-like forks from pre-war German households— all those times and lives stolen from families as they fled to New York, yet with silver and china and paintings in tow
put Portuguese folk-art figures all down the center pull out the stuff a mother knew a bride should have— salmon-pink gold-rimmed china, silver set complete (bought from Southerners whose cutlery, horror of horrors, now serves up Yankees and foreigners galore) place salt dishes and fairy-sized spoons use wine glasses so thin they’re a bother [End Page 38] her things bespeak a southern housekeeping that hasn’t quite taken hold in my slapdash arrangement of kitchen eating and backyard dining— but the sweet times of the ladies book club, when I pull out the stops and lay a fine table my mother would smile on her own good teaching— brisket sparked with Hungarian paprika honoring her richly rowdy Jewish roots served to the brainy bookish warm-hearted ladies from Haiti, Iran, Germany, Britain Chicago and Buffalo Springfield. [End Page 39]
Buff Lindau is a new-comer to writing poetry, but not to the study of literature. She earned a Ph.D. in English in 1974 with a dissertation on Feminism in the English Novel. At age 63, she is writing poems about her heritage of growing up in South Carolina in a reform Jewish household with parents of German and Eastern European roots. She and her husband raised their two sons in Burlington, Vermont, where she lives now, and works as public relations director for Saint Michael’s College.
