Recipe for Marinara
by Michael Sandler
My mother wasn’t Italian, and her marinara
not from the old country, but noticing
how I slurped spaghetti, she made a sauce
from nowhere but a sense
of what a child liked, asking me
to close my eyes,
to smell each herb and spice… I inhale
garlic, fennel, nutmeg, nostrils flaring,
an odori peppering an oil-stained pot,
the tongue lingering
at the thought, stroking the palate
swelled with mouth’s sour wine—
the nose following
redolent threads of an updraft
to our kitchen nook one evening
when I ate alone with her,
had her full attention
otherwise devoured by my father,
a brother now in bed with flu.
Mid-forkful, she ruminates
about how she’ll be remembered,
asking what comes to mind.
I try to push to the side of the plate
barbs I wish she hadn’t meant—such a klutz,
don’t dress like a slob, you’re slouching—
and focus on the marinara’s
tangy sweetness, replying, Oh, I don’t know,
whereupon she leans over and strokes
my cheek, her perfume lingering…
Other gossamers of sense entombed
like a fossil in shale;
though I add each ingredient
and flesh out each step,
stirring, salting it as she would,
her sauce fails to reincarnate.
Leaning against a countertop, I tap
an oil fleck somehow left unwashed—
wisp of thyme, savor of a thought?
Thought of an abiding faith
that, in some way, the spirit abides,
wafting at a threshold
between nullity and touch… or taste—
it piques the mind, glazing
ridges if not al dente strands,
my tongue licking
a brine that almost preserves it.
Michael Sandler is the author of a poetry collection, The Lamps of History (FutureCycle Press 2021). His work has appeared in scores of journals, including recently in THINK, Literary Imagination, and Smartish Pace. Michael lives near Seattle; his website is www.sandlerpoetry.com.
