Leave the answering machine on.
No one comes to the door any longer.
We would be scared.
That’s why we have an alarm.
That’s why we keep the gun loaded.
Drive-in food, drive-in teller,
drive-by shooting, stay in the car.
Talk only to the television set.
It tells you just what to buy
so you won’t feel lonely
any longer, so you won’t feel
inadequate, bored, so you can
almost imagine yourself alive.
Always unsuitable
She wore little teeth of pearls around her neck.
They were grinning politely and evenly at me.
Unsuitable they smirked. It is true
I look a stuffed turkey in a suit. Breasts
too big for the silhouette. She knew
at once that we had sex, lots of it
as if I had strolled into her diningroom
in a dirty negligee smelling gamy
smelling fishy and sporting a strawberry
on my neck. I could never charm
the mothers, although the fathers ogled
me. I was exactly what mothers had warned
their sons against. I was quicksand.
I was trouble in the afternoon. I was
the alley cat you don’t bring home.
Where I came from, the nights I had wandered
and survived, scared them, and where
I would go they never imagined.
Ah, what you wanted for your sons
were little ladies hatched from the eggs
of pearls like pink and silver lizards
cool, well behaved and impervious
to desire and weather alike. Mostly
that’s who they married and left.
Oh, mamas, I would have been your friend.
I would have cooked for you and held you.
I might have rattled the windows
of your sorry marriages, but I would
have loved you better than you know
how to love yourselves, bitter sisters.
from
The Art of Blessing the Day
The art of blessing the day
This is the blessing for rain after drought:
Come down, wash the air so it shimmers,
a perfumed shawl of lavender chiffon.
Let the parched leaves suckle and swell.
Enter my skin, wash me for the little
chrysalis of sleep rocked in your plashing.
In the morning the world is peeled to shining.
This is the blessing for sun after long rain:
Now everything shakes itself free and rises.
The trees are bright as pushcart ices.
Every last lily opens its satin thighs.
The bees dance and roll in pollen
and the cardinal at the top of the pine
sings at full throttle, fountaining.
This is the blessing for a ripe peach:
This is luck made round. Frost can nip
the blossom, kill the bee. It can drop,
a hard green useless nut. Brown fungus,
the burrowing worm that coils in rot can
blemish it and wind crush it on the ground.
Yet this peach fills my mouth with juicy sun.
This is the blessing for the first garden tomato:
Those green boxes of tasteless acid the store
sells in January, those red things with the savor
of wet chalk, they mock your fragrant name.
How fat and sweet you are weighing down my palm,
warm as the flank of a cow in the sun.
You are the savor of summer in a thin red skin.
This is the blessing for a political victory:
Although I shall not forget that things
work in increments and epicycles and sometime
leaps that half the time fall back down,
let’s not relinquish dancing while the music
fits into our hips and bounces our heels.
We must never forget, pleasure is real as pain.
The blessing for the return of a favorite cat,
the blessing for love returned, for friends’
return, for money received unexpected;
the blessing for the rising of the bread,
the sun, the oppressed. I am not sentimental
about old men mumbling the Hebrew by rote
with no more feeling than one says gesundheit.
But the discipline of blessings is to taste
each moment, the bitter, the sour, the sweet
and the salty, and be glad for what does not
hurt. The art is in compressing attention
to each little and big blossom of the tree
of life, to let the tongue sing each fruit,
its savor, its aroma and its use.
children, mothers, fathers, pets,
our friends, the news, the woes of others.
What we want to change we curse and then
pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can
with eyes and hands and tongue. If you
can’t bless it, get ready to make it new.
Learning to read
My mother would not teach me to read.
Experts in newspapers and pop books
said school must receive us virgin.
Secrets were locked in those
black scribbles on white, magic
to open the sky and the earth.
In a book I tried to guess from
pictures, a mountain had in its side
a door through which children ran in
after a guy playing a flute
dressed all in green, and I too
wanted to march into a mountain.
When I sat at Grandmother’s seder,
the book went around and everybody
read. I did not make a distinction
between languages. Half the words
in English were strange to me.
I knew when I had learned to read
all would be clear, I would know
everything that adults knew, and more.
Every handle would turn for me.
At school I grabbed words like toys
I had been denied. Finally I
could read, me. I read every sign
from the car. On journeys I read
maps. I read cereal boxes
and cans spelling out the hard words.
All printing was sacred.
At the seder I sat down at the table,
self-important, adult on my cushion.
I was no longer the youngest child
but the smartest. When the haggadah
was to be passed across me,
I grabbed it, roaring confidence.
But the squiggles, the scratches
were back. Not a letter
waved to me. I was blinded again.
That night I learned about tongues.
Grandma explained she herself spoke
Yiddish, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian
and bad English, little Hebrew.
That’s okay, I said. I will
learn all languages. But I was
fifty before I read Hebrew.
I no longer expect to master
every alphabet before death
snatches away everything I know.
But they are always beckoning to me
those languages still squiggles
and noises, like lovers I never
had time to enjoy, places
I have never (yet) arrived.
Snowflakes, my mother called them
Snowflakes, my mother called them.
My grandmother made papercuts
until she was too blind to see
the intricate birds, trees, Mogen
Davids, moon
s, flowers
that appeared like magic
when the folded paper
was opened.
My mother made simpler ones,
abstract. She never saved them.
Not hers, not mine.
It was a winter game.
Usually we had only newsprint
to play with. Sometimes
we used old wrapping paper,
white sheets from the bakery.
Often Grandma tacked hers
to the walls or on the window
that looked on the street,
the east window where the sun
rose hidden behind tenements
where she faced to pray.
I remember one with deer,
delicate hooves, fine antlers
for Pesach. Her animals were
always in pairs, the rabbits,
the cats, always cats in pairs,
little mice, but never horses,
for horses meant pogrom,
the twice widowed woman’s
sense of how things should be,
even trees by twos for company.
I had forgotten. I had lost it all
until a woman sent me a papercut
to thank me for a poem, and then
in my hand I felt a piece of past
materialize, a snowflake long melted,
evaporated, cohering and once
again long necked fragile deer
stood, made of skill and absence.
On Shabbat she dances in the candle flame
How we danced then, you can’t imagine
my grandmother said. We danced
till we were dizzy, we danced
till the room spun like a dreydl,
we danced ourselves drunk and giddy,
we danced till we fell panting.
We were poor, my grandmother said,
a few potatoes, some half rotten
beans, greens from the hedgerow.
But then on Shabbat we ate a chicken.
The candles shone on the golden skin.
We drank sweet wine and flew up to the ceiling.
How I loved him, you can’t imagine
my grandmother said. He was from St.
Petersburg, my father could scarcely
believe he was a Jew, he dressed so fine.
His eyes burned when he looked at me.
He quoted Pushkin instead of Mishnah.
Nine languages and still the Czar
wanted him in the Army, where Jews
went off but never returned.
My father married us from his deathbed.
We escaped the Pale under a load of straw.
You can’t imagine, we were frightened mice.
Eleven children I bore, my grandmother said,
nine who grew up, four who died
before me. Now I sing in your ear.
When you pray I stand beside you.
Eliyahu’s cup at the seder table is for
me, who cooked and never sat down:
now I sit enthroned on your computer.
Now I am the queen of dustmop tales,
I preside over your memory lighting
candles that summon the dead.
I touch your lids while you sleep
and when you wake, you imagine me.
In the grip of the solstice
Feels like a train roaring into night,
the journey into fierce cold just beginning.
The ground is newly frozen, the crust
brittle and fancy with striations,
steeples and nipples we break
under our feet.
Every day we are shortchanged a bit more,
night pressing down on the afternoon
throttling it. Wan sunrise later
and later, every day trimmed
like an old candle you beg to give
an hour’s more light.
Feels like hurtling into vast darkness,
the sky itself whistling of space
the black matter between stars
the red shift as the light dies,
warmth a temporary aberration,
entropy as a season.
Our ancestors understood the brute
fear that grips us as the cold
settles around us, closing in.
Light the logs in the fireplace tonight,
light the candles, first one, then two,
the full chanukkiyah.
Light the fire in the belly.
Eat hot soup, cabbage and beef
borsch, chicken soup, lamb
and barley, stoke the marrow.
Put down the white wine and pour
whiskey instead.
We reach for each other in our bed
the night vaulted above us
like a cave. Night in the afternoon,
cold frosting the glass so it hurts
to touch it, only flesh still
welcoming to flesh.
Woman in a shoe
There was an old woman who lived
in a shoe, her own two shoes,
men’s they were, brown and worn.
They flapped when she hobbled along.
There was an old woman who lived
in a refrigerator box under
the expressway with her cat.
January, they died curled together.
There was an old woman who lived
in a room under the roof. It
got hot, but she was scared
to open the window. It got hotter.
Too hot, too cold, too poor,
too old. Invisible unless
she annoys you, invisible
unless she gets in your way.
In fairy tales if you are kind
to an old woman, she gives you
the thing you desperately need:
an unconquerable sword, a purse
bottomless and always filled,
a magical ring. We don’t believe
that anymore. Such tales were
made up by old women scared
to be thrust from the hearth,
shoved into the street to starve.
Who fears an old woman pushing
a grocery cart? She is talking
to god as she shuffles along,
her life in her pockets. You
are the true child of her heart
and you see living garbage.
Growing up haunted
When I enter through the hatch of memory
those claustrophobic chambers,
my adolescence in the booming fifties
of General Eisenhower, General Foods
and General Motors, I see our dreams
obsolescent mannequins in Dior frocks
armored, prefabricated bodies;
and I see our nightmares, powerful
as a wine red sky and wall of fire.
Fear was the underside of every leaf
we turned, the knowledge that our
cousins, our other selves, had been
starved and butchered to ghosts.
The question every smoggy morning
presented like a covered dish:
why are you living and all those
mirror selves, sisters, gone
into smoke like stolen cigarettes.
I remember my grandmother’s cry
when she learned the death of all she
remembered, girls she bathed with,
young men with whom she shyly
flirted, wooden shul where
her father rocked and prayed,
red haired aunt plucking the
balalaika, world of sun and snow
turned to shadows on a yellow page.
Assume no future you may not have
to fight for, to die for, muttered
ghosts gathered on the foot
of my bed each night. What you
carry in your blood is us,
the books w
e did not write,
music we could not make, a world
gone from gristle to smoke, only
as real now as words can make it.
At the well
Though I’m blind now and age
has gutted me to rubbing bones
knotted up in a leather sack
like Old Man Jacob I wrestled an angel.
It happened near that well by Peniel
where the water runs copper cold
even in drought. Sore and dusty
I was traveling my usual rounds
wary of strangers—for some men
think nothing of setting on any woman
alone—doctoring a bit, setting bones,
herbs and simples I know well,
divining for water with a switch,
selling my charms of odd shaped bones
and stones with fancy names to less
skeptical women wanting a lover, a son,
a husband, or relief from one.
The stones were sharp as shinbones under me.
When I awoke at midnight it had come,
a presence furious as a goat about to butt;
amused as those yellow eyes
sometimes seem just before
the hind legs kick hard.
The angel struck me
and we wrestled all that night.
My dust stained gristle of a body
clad in proper village black
was pushed against him
and his fiery chest
fell through me like a star.
Raw with bruises, with my muscles
sawing like donkey’s brays,
I thought fighting can be like
making love. Then in the grey
placental dawn I saw.
“I know you now, face
on a tree of fire
eyes of my youngest sweetest
dead, face I saw in the mirror
right after my first child