RECIPE FOR VINTAGE BURGUNDY
Gently mix sister-wife three with the whistle punk king. Let rise.
Marrinate in Marchs, Bennets, and Rostovs; Esther Summerson. Aim for Lizzie, not Natasha, not Dunya. Not Joe.
Flay with King James purple prose, sham and true.
Stir in Dimtri, Ivan, Alyosha, Pavel. One more, Judas. Five brothers unripe, but with lush diapers and muscular lungs.
Add Mother. Add dad, but set him aside.
Use pencils whittled from ancient pines in indigenous lands, and paper pulped beneath a pillaged cerulean sea.
Stew to seething, then withdraw. to cobbled paths, Kutná Hora, where Rint signed with bones. At St. Vitus’s arm, finally praying.
Then, ingest newer horrors, the child’s resort at Terezin, offering science, art, brutality.
Flee to waste-stained alleys as masses of angels flow by, only to plunge wingless, leaving fresh ashes, smoke.
Scarper. Bail. Camouflage.
Change locations. Change selves. Embrace Jane’s atavism, Dorothea’s blunder.
Disappear among stacked laser prints, dust suspended in half light over an abandoned city. High in Bertha’s cell, double. Then rise again.
Place anew in that savaged, refined forest, at St. George’s spring. Root, bud, harvest, ferment.
Slay your dragons there too.
