Conka

by John Briscoe

When all the others were away at mass
it was like that with me too.
I stayed home with her and her floured hands
and floured hair and apron.  From the icebox
in the screened-in pantry she carried plates
of dough balls she had made the day before
of flour, manteca, water and salt,
each the size of my little fist.
Taking the top ball from the pyramid
she’d flatten it with the heels of her palms
then fingers working beneath the dough, thumbs
on top, begin to whirl a widening disc
much as I had seen the Italian cooks do
with two big hairy hands and much more dough
then would stop mid-spin and ask me in Spanish,
What is a mouse when it spins?, before
handing me a dough ball to try myself.
She would guide my little fingers but I,
I think now, could never get the hang of it.
Like a cook uncurdling a broken sauce
she’d repair my torn and tattered tortilla,
cook it on the griddle side of the stove,
a Wedgewood wood-burning stove and tell me I had made it.
She’d sizzle lard in a skillet to scramble eggs
with chopped calves’ brains and maybe
she’d make hot chocolate–
 
      Sesos con huevos, con tortillas y–
         acaso, tal vez, quizas, tal vez–
           chocolate caliente.
 
Come to think of it she never sat down
to eat with me, and rarely then with others.
She only served me, and cleaned after me
and told me stories during the while
of her husband, my grandfather murdered
by a stranger just for his police badge
when she was only twenty with four sons,
my father and his three younger brothers,
of her mother Trinidad, a singer
and bar dancer, and her father Fernando,
the woodcarver of Old St. Mary’s Church
in Phoenix, Arizona Territory,
who was also a saloon keeper
who could not enter the saloon he owned
because his kind was not allowed in a bar
anywhere in White Man Country
anywhere in the country.
 
That’s how I know
what little I know
of her.
That’s how I know
what little I know.

John Briscoe is a San Francisco poet, author, lawyer and restaurateur. He has published poetry, articles on law, literature and history, and several books including Crush: The Triumph of California Wine, The Lost Poems of Cangjie, and Tadich Grill: The Story of San Francisco’s Oldest Restaurant. Since 1972 he has argued and tried cases in the United States Supreme Court, in the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, and in courts across the country. The senior partner in the San Francisco law firm Briscoe Ivester & Bazel LLP, Briscoe served as a special adviser to the United Nations concerning the environmental devastation caused by Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait during the Gulf War, and has represented nations in boundary and in law-of-war disputes. A distinguished fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, he has served for 22 years on the advisory board of the creative-writing MFA program at St. Mary’s College of California. He sits on the boards of several historical societies, and other organizations as well.

Briscoe is co-owner of Sam’s Grill in San Francisco, founded in 1867 and the fifth-oldest restaurant in the United States. Writers, artists, poets, pipefitters, carpenters, journalists, laborers, lawyers and the political class all come to Sam’s, to be home.