Blue as the eyes of a Siamese cat.
Blue as shadows on new snow, as a spring
azure sipping from a puddle on the blacktop.
Cobalt as the midnight sky
when day has gone without a trace
and we lie in each other’s arms
eyes shut and fingers open
and all the colors of the world
pass through our bodies like strings of fire.
from
The Crooked Inheritance
Tracks
The small birds leave cuneiform
messages on the snow: I have
been here, I am hungry, I
must eat. Where I dropped
seeds they scrape down
to pine needles and frozen sand.
Sometimes when snow flickers
past the windows, muffles trees
and bushes, buries the path,
the jays come knocking with their beaks
on my bedroom window:
to them I am made of seeds.
To the cats, I am mother and lover,
lap and toy, cook and cleaner.
To the coyotes I am chaser and shouter.
To the crows, watcher, protector.
To the possums, the foxes, the skunks:
a shadow passing, a moment’s wind.
I was bad watchful mommy to one man.
To another I was forgiving sister
whose hand poured out honey and aloe;
to that woman I was a gale whose lashing
waves threatened her foundation; to this
one, an oak to her flowering vine.
I have worn the faces, the masks
of hieroglyphs, gods and demons,
bat faced ghosts, sibyls and thieves,
lover, loser, red rose and ragweed,
these are the tracks I have left
on the white crust of time.
The crooked inheritance
A short neck like my mother
long legs like my father
my grandmother’s cataract of hair
and my grandmother’s cataracts
my father’s glaucoma
my mother’s stout heart
my father’s quick temper
my mother’s curiosity
my father’s rationality
my mother’s fulsome breasts
my father’s narrow feet
Yet only my grandmother saw in me
a remembrance of children past
You have a good quick mind like Moishe.
Your grandfather zecher l’vrocho
had a gift for languages too.
Rivka also had weak eyes
and a delicate stomach.
You can run as fast as Feygeleh.
You know that means little bird?
I was a nest of fledglings chirping
hunger and a future of flight
to her, but to my parents,
the misshapen duckling
who failed to make flesh
their dreams of belonging:
a miraculous blond angel
who would do everything
right they had failed.
Instead they got a black
haired poet who ran away.
Talking with my mother
“I don’t believe in heaven or any of that
horseshit tied up with bows,” she says.
“That’s one advantage being Jewish
among all the troubles I had: you don’t
have to buy that nonsense. I’m just dead.”
“Okay,” I say, “but just suppose. Of your
three husbands, who would you want
waiting on the other side? Would they
line up? Would you have all three?”
“None,” she says, “to hell with them.
I always remember the one I didn’t
go off with. That’s the one I would
think of when I lay awake beside
their snores. But likely he’d have turned
out the same. Piggy, cold, jealous,
self-occupied. Now that I’m dead
I don’t have to worry I have no skills,
only worked as a chambermaid.
I’ll live by myself in a clean house
with a cat or maybe two. Males.
Females are sluts. Like you,” she
says, pointing. “I’ll cook what I
like for a change—do the dead eat?”
“How would I know?” I ask. “Well,”
she says, “you’re writing the dialogue.
too much sex. In your books too
much, in my last thirty years,
too little. Remember,” she says, “you
never stop wanting it till you’re dead.
No, I think I’ll stay quiet. No more
money troubles, no more too fat,
too thin, no more of his contempt
and his sly relatives picking at me.
Let me go down into dirt and sleep.”
Swear it
My mother swore ripely, inventively
a flashing storm of American and Yiddish
thundering onto my head and shoulders.
My father swore briefly, like an ax
descending on the nape of a sinner.
But all the relatives on my father’s
side, gosh, they said, goldarnit.
What happened to those purveyors
of soft putty cussing, go to heck,
they would mutter, you son of a gun.
They had limbs instead of legs.
Privates encompassed everything
from bow to stern. They did
number one and number two
and eventually, perhaps, it.
It has always amazed me there are
words too potent to say to those
whose ears are tender as baby
lettuces—often those who label
us into narrow jars with salt and
vinegar, saying, People like them,
meaning me and mine. Never say
the k or n word, just quietly shut
and bolt the door. Just politely
insert your foot in the Other’s face.
Motown, Arsenal of Democracy
Fog used to bloom off the distant river
turning our streets strange, elongating
sounds and muffling others. The crack
of a gunshot softened.
The sky at night was a dull red:
a bonfire built of old creosote soaked
logs by the railroad tracks. A red
almost pink painted by factories—
that never stopped their roar
like traffic in canyons of New York.
But stop they did and fell down
ending dangerous jobs that paid.
We believed in our unions like some
trust in their priests. We believed
in Friday paychecks sure as
winter’s ice curb to curb
where older boys could play
hockey dodging cars—wooden
pucks, sticks cracking wood
on wood. A man came home
with a new car and other men
would collect around it like ants
in sugar. Women clumped for showers—
wedding and baby—wakes, funerals
care for the man brought home
with a hole ripped in him, children
coughing. We all coughed in Detroit.
We woke at dawn to my father’s hack.
That world is gone as a tableau
of wagon trains. Expressways carved
neighborhoods to shreds. Rich men
moved jobs south, then overseas.
Only the old anger lives there
bubbling up like chemicals dumped
seething now into the water
building now into th
e bones.
Tanks in the streets
Tanks that year roared through
streets lined with bosomy elms—
tanks with slowly turning turrets
like huge dinosaur heads
their slitted gaze staring us down,
soldiers with rifles cradled
in their arms like babies
stalking past the corner drugstore.
They were entering a foreign land
occupied by dangerous natives:
Detroit: a pool of rainbow
slithering oil ringed by suburbs
of brick colonials and ranches,
then the vast half hidden
fortified houses of those who
grew rich off Detroit.
Class hatred was ground into
my palms like grease into
my brother’s hands, like coal
dust into my uncle’s. TV
had not yet taught us we
were nothing and only
celebrities had lives that
counted. We poured into
the streets, but the ones we
struck with our rocks, bottles
were each other, white against
Black, Polack against Jew,
Irish against hillbilly. Always,
after the tanks rolled off
it was our corpses strewn
in every riot, in every war.
The Hollywood haircut
I pay $40 to have my haircut.
Last night I saw on television
from Hollywood a $400 haircut.
If I had a $400 haircut
would traffic part for me on the highway
like the Red Sea?
Would men one third my age
follow me panting in the street
and old men faint as I passed?
If I had a $400 haircut
would my books become best
sellers and all my bills be written paid?
If I had a $400 haircut
would I have more orgasms
louder ones; would my eyelashes curl?
If I had a $400 haircut
would people buy calendars
just me on every month grinning?
If I had a $400 haircut
would everyone love me and
would you volunteer
to come clean my house
iron my never ironed shirts
and weed my jungle garden?
No? I thought so.
I’ll stick to Sarah
and my $40 trim.
The good, the bad and the inconvenient
Gardening is often a measured cruelty:
what is to live and what is to be torn
up by its roots and flung on the compost
to rot and give its essence to new soil.
It is not only the weeds I seize.
I go down the row of new spinach
their little bright Vs crowding
and snatch every other, flinging
their little bodies just as healthy,
just as sound as their neighbors
but judged, by me, superfluous.
We all commit crimes too small
for us to measure, the ant soldiers
we stomp, whose only aim was to
protect, to feed their vast family.
It is I who decide which beetles
are “good” and which are “bad”
as if each is not whole in its kind.
We eat to live and so do they,
the locusts, the grasshoppers,
flea beetles, aphids and slugs.
By bad I mean inconvenient. Nothing
we do is simple, without consequence
and each act is shadowed with death.
Intense
One morning they are there:
silken nets where the sun ignites
water drops to sparks of light—
handkerchiefs of bleached chiffon
spread over the grasses, stretched
among kinickkinick and heather.
Spiders weave them all at once
hatched and ready, brief splendor.
Walking to pick beans, I tear them.
I can’t avoid their evanescent glitter.
I have never seen the little spinners
who make of my ragged lawn and meadow
an encampment of white tents
as if an army of tiny seraphim had deployed—
how beautiful are your tents O Israel—
the hand- or leggywork of hungry spiders
extruding a tent city from swollen bellies.
How to make pesto
Go out in mid sunny morning
a day bright as a bluejay’s back
after the dew has vanished
fading like the memory of a dream.
Go with scissors and basket.
Snip to encourage branching.
Never strip the basil plant
but fill the basket to overarching.
Take the biggest garlic cloves
and cut them in quarters to ease
off the paper that hides the ivory
tusk within. Grind Parmesan.
I use pine nuts. Olive oil
must be a virgin. I like Greek
or Sicilian. Now the aroma
fills first the nose, then the kitchen.
The UPS man in the street sniffs.
The neighbors complain; the cats
don’t. We eat it on pasta, chicken,
on lamb, on beans, on salmon
and zucchini. We add it to salad
dressings. We rub it behind our
ears. We climb into a tub of pesto
giggling to make aromatic love.
The moon as cat as peach
The moon is a white cat in a peach tree.
She is licking her silky fur
making herself perfect.
This is only a moment
round as a peach you have
not yet bitten into.
If you do not eat it,
it will rot. The peach
offers itself like a smile.
It cares only for the pit
hiding within. The cat
is waiting for prey.
She is indifferent
to the noisy boasting sun
that rattles like a truck
up the dawn sky clanging.
It is too early for such
clatter. She curls into sleep.
Tomorrow she will begin to hide
until you cannot see her
at all. She smiles.
August like lint in the lungs
If Jell-O could be hot, it would be this air.
Needles under the pines are bleached
to straw but mushrooms poke up white
yellow, red—wee beach umbrellas of poison.
Everything sags—oak leaf, tomato
plant, spiky candelabra of lilies,
papers, me. Sun burns acetylene.
Shade’s a cave where dark waters bless.
Then up the radar of the weather channel
a red wave seeps toward us. Limp air
stiffens. Wind rushes over the house
tearing off leaves as the sky curdles.
The cat hides under the bed. We slam
windows and the door slams itself.
Everything is swirling as the army
of the rain advances toward us
flattening the tall grasses. Waves
break their knuckles on the roof.
Missiles of water pock the glass.
We feel under water and siege.
Then the rain stops suddenly
as if a great switch had been thrown.
Even the trees look dazed. Heat
creeps back in like a guilty dog.
Metamorphosis
On the folds of the cocoon
segmented, coiled
like a little brown stairway
h
is fingers are gentle.
In the next chamber
he coaxes a newly hatched
green and purple caterpillar
onto a leaf, stroking it.
We all care for something,
someone. Maybe just our-
selves or family or money.
He loves butterflies.
He built a museum to them,
a sanctuary of fluttering.
Blue morphos, owl
eyes, cattle pinks, orange
and red and black,
umber, lemon, speckled
and zebra striped
they zigzag round us.
Cold leans against the windows.
The roads are clogged
with ice, walled with old
grey snow like cement.
Here the air is warm
moist in our nostrils.
Flowers thicken it.
Now he is placing a cocoon
in a glass container
to change itself, hidden—
as if in a mummy case
an angel should form.
It will be a tobacco hornworm
moth, he says. We pick
them off our tomato plants
Woody says, proud that we
never spray. The custodian
is shocked. You can buy
tomatoes at the super-
market, he says.
Not like ours, I say. A seed
the size of a freckle
turning into a five foot
vine bearing red globes
big as my fist with
the true taste of summer
is miracle too: my garden’s
yearly metamorphosis.