Choose a color
Between red and dead, we lived frightened
crouching, covering, signing loyalty oaths.
The war they called cold froze our brains.
The Russians were coming to burn
our flags and steal our color TVs.
Between green and machine, the ozone
fades away scorching our flesh. Glaciers
seep into the sea. Hurricanes come
in quick posses. Drought or torrent.
Polar bears drown swimming for land.
Between blue and Prozac, who will
you be? The brooks are grey with
antibiotics, antidepressants, pain
killers. The fish sleep upsidedown.
This pill will make you inane.
Between lavender and hellfire,
preachers froth. Get saved again,
again. Yet it still itches. In the
dark, what you really want licks
your thighs, burns hot in your brain.
Between white and night, dark
faces invade your entitlement.
They are stealing your birthright
to stomp and swell. Why can’t
the world be peopled by only you?
Pick a color, any color from zero
to infinity, from blood to cancer,
from war to Armageddon, from AIDS
to bone, from here to no one
on a very fast jet.
Deadlocked wedlock
Marriage is one man and one woman
they say, one at a time, then another, another.
You see the buffed faces of old men shining
with money as they lead their young blonds
and toddlers, second or third families,
the shopworn wives donated to Goodwill.
It has always been so, they say,
one man and one woman in the Bible—
like Jacob with Leah and Rachel
and two bondmaidens dropping children,
his four women competing to swell
like a galaxy of moons.
In Tibet women had various husbands at once.
I had two myself for a few years.
In earlier times and different cultures
and tribes, men married men and women
married women, and the sky never fell.
People loved as they would and must
and the rivers still ran clean and the grass
grew a lot thicker and more abundantly
than it does with us. What damage
does love do in the soft grey evenings
when the rain drifts like pigeon feathers
across the sky and into the trees?
Why, gentlemen, do you fear two women
who walk holding hands with their child?
Two fifty-year-old men exchange rings
and kiss, and you catch mad cow disease?
What do you hate when you watch
lovers? What are you really missing?
Money is one of those things
Money is one of those things like health:
when you have it you feel entitled.
It’s part of you like your left elbow
or your front teeth. But they can
easily be pulled and so can your
credit, your wage, all that money
you squirreled away in stocks
going up like rockets on the 4th.
Money never belongs to us.
It’s a paper fiction we believe
like the first guy who says
in the backseat he loves you.
He’s already planning a move
on a cheerleader, but his voice trembles
a little and you’re too young to
know it’s his hardon talking.
Money comes on that way. You
want that, it tells you, you got to have
a new couch, a new car, a new nose.
I’ll make you so happy, it croons,
I’ll make you shine like a gas fire
burning in a car that just rearended
an SUV, and don’t you want one too?
I love you, I’m yours forever
money sings, you’re so important,
unique, I’m your love slave.
Just make a central place for me
in your heart, your hearth. Right
there where your brain used to be.
Oh, it comes and it goes like a tide
pulled by a titanium moon, and what
it truly loves and obeys is power.
In our name
In your name, we have invaded
come with planes, tanks and artillery
into a country and wonder why
they do not like us
be proud
In your name we have bombed villages
and towns and left torn babies
the bloated bellies of their mothers
a little boy crying for his father
who lies under his broken house
the smashed arms of teenagers
in the sunbaked streets
every death creates a warrior
be proud
In our name we have taken men
and women from their homes
in the afternoon breaking down their doors
in the night waking them to the rattle
of weapons leaving their children
weeping with fear
be proud
In your name we have taken those we suspect
because they were in the wrong place
or because someone who hated them gave their name
or because a soldier didn’t like the way they stared at him
put them in cells and strung them up like slaughtered cattle
stripped their clothes and mocked them naked
ran electricity through their tender parts
set dogs to rip their flesh
in your name
be proud
This is who we are becoming.
There is none other but us sanctioning this.
In our name young boys from Newark and Sandusky
are shot at by people who live in the place
they have been marched to.
in our name a young woman from Detroit
is disemboweled by a bomb.
In our name the sons of out of work miners
step on land mines.
In our name their bodies are shipped home.
In our name fathers return to their children
maimed and blind, their brains sered.
This is who we are in Athens or in Lima not Ohio
when people glare at us in the street.
This is the person my passport identifies,
the one who allows the order to be given
for blood to be mixed with sand
for bones to be mixed with mud
In our name is all this being carried out right now
as we sit here, as we speak, as we sleep.
Every day we do not act, we are permitting.
Every day we do not say no, we all say yes
be proud.
Bashert*
Remember when you invited me into
your kitchen and cut a ripe mango:
orange, deep scented, juicy on a green
platter. I thought then, perhaps
we will be lovers.
Remember when you came up the gravel
drive and I fed you my grandmother’s
sour cherry soup, cold and touched
with cream. You wondered
then, could we be lovers?
So many years worn away, smoothed
in the swift waters of memory.
Suppose you had not driven out
that June day, suppose it had rained
suppose I had accepted a former
lover’s Iowa invitation. Suppose,
a hundred forking divergent moments
li
ke the intricate web of cracked
pond ice. Or maybe the dividing
paths of a myriad other choices
would have joined back to the master
trunk where we clasp each other
murmuring love. I was the juicy
mango you bit into that day, and you
are my sweet and my sour
my past and my future, my best
hope and my worst fear, my friend
and brother and sparring partner.
Chance or fate, we grasped what
was offered us and we hold on.
* the destined one
The lived in look
My second mother-in-law had white carpeting
white sofa with blue designer touches.
Everything sparkled. Walking on the beach
I got tar on bare feet. Footprints
across that arctic expanse marred
perfection. I have never eaten
without dribbles and droplets exploding
from me like wet sparks on tablecloth
on my clothes, on the ceiling,
miraculously appearing five blocks
away as stigmata on statues. In short
a certain limited chaos exudes from
my pores. Everyone over fifty was born
to a world where ideal housewives
scrubbed floors to blinding gloss
in pearls and taffeta dresses on TV.
Women came with umbilical cords
leading to vacuum cleaners. You
plugged in a wife and she began
a wash cycle while her eyes spun.
Every three weeks we shovel out
the kitchen and bath. Spanish moss
of webs festoon our rafters. Cat hair
is the decorating theme of our couches.
Don’t apologize for walls children
drew robots on, don’t blush for last
month’s newspapers on the coffee
table under cartons from Sunday’s takeout.
This is the sweet imprint of your life
and loves upon the rumpled sheets
of your days. Relax. Breathe deeply.
Mess will make us free.
Mated
You are shoveling snow in the long drive
down to the road, tossing it. From
my window you resemble a great
downcoated bear shaking himself dry.
You cannot make a good omelet;
I cannot fence the tomato garden.
You cannot balance a checkbook;
I cannot pull out a rusted screw.
I can make perfect pie dough; you
can plow all the gardens by dusk.
I can speak French and Spanish,
learn languages enough to manage
Czech, Greek, Norwegian, what
ever travel requires; you can drive
on the wrong side of roads, conquer
roundabouts an hour out of Heathrow.
I can read maps; you read spread-
sheets, wiring diagrams. That’s
what mating is, the inserting of
parts that together make completion
prick and cunt, word and answer
all the antiphony of love.
My grandmother’s song
We were girls, said my grandmother.
We went to the river with our laundry
to beat it on the stones, washing
it clean, and then we spread it
on the wide grey boulders to dry.
We were laughing, said my grandmother
all of us girls together unmarried
and mostly unafraid, although of course
as Jews we were always a little on edge.
You know how a sparrow pecks seeds
always watching, listening for danger
to pounce. We gossiped about bad
girls over the river and boys and who
had peeked at us as we passed.
We took off our clothes, hung them
on bushes and bathed in the cool
rushing water, talking of Maidele
who threw herself in the current
to carry her big belly away, telling
of ghosts and dybbuks, of promises.
Then grandmother would sigh and dab
a small tear, and I would wonder
what she missed. I would rather
bathe in a tub, I said, in warm water.
The mikvah was warm, she said, and
the river was cold, but we liked
the river, young girls who did not
guess what would happen to us, how
our hopes would melt like candle wax
how we would bear and bear children
like apples falling from the tree
so many, but a tree that bled
and some would just rot in the grass.
You never forget the ones who die
she said even if you only held them
two months or twelve, they come
back in the night and circle like fish
opening silent mouths and never
do they grow older, but you do.
Your hair hangs like strands
of a worn-out mop, your flesh
puffs up like bread from too much yeast
or dwindles till your arms are brittle
sticks and the frost never leaves you.
I want to go down to the river
again, I want to hear the singing
and tell stories with friends we would
never tell in front of our mothers.
I want to go down to the river,
wade in and let it wash my bones
down to the hope that must surely
still form their marrow, deep
and rich in spite of the sights
that have dimmed my eyes
and tears that have pickled my heart.
The birthday of the world
I begin to contemplate
what I have done and left
undone, but this year
not so much rebuilding
of my perennially damaged
psyche, shoring up eroding
friendships, digging out
stumps of old resentments
that refuse to rot on their own.
No, this year I want to call
myself to task for what
I have done and not done
for peace. How much have
I dared in opposition?
How much have I put
on the line for freedom?
For mine and others?
As these freedoms are pared,
sliced and diced, where
have I spoken out? Who
have I tried to move? In
this holy season, I stand
self-convicted of sloth
in a time when lies choke
the mind and rhetoric
bends reason to slithering
choking pythons. Here
I stand before the gates
opening, the fire dazzling
my eyes and as I approach
what judges me, I judge
myself. Give me weapons
of minute destruction. Let
my words turn into sparks.
N’eilah
The hinge of the year:
the great gates opening
and then slowly slowly
closing on us.
I always imagine those gates
hanging over the ocean
fiery over the stone grey
waters of evening.
We cast what we must
change about ourselves
onto the waters flowing
to the sea. The sins,
errors, bad habits, whatever
you call them, dissolve.
When I was little I cried
out I! I! I! I want I want.
Older, I f
eel less important,
a worker bee in the hive
of history, miles of hard
labor to make my sweetness.
The gates are closing
The light is failing
I kneel before what I love
imploring that it may live.
So much breaks, wears
down, fails in us. We must
forgive our broken promises—
their sharp shards in our hands.
In the sukkah
Open to the sky
as our lives truly are
for down upon us can rain
all that our world has to offer—
sun and sleet, bombs and debris,
bits of space junk, meteorites
the red and yellow leaves
just beginning to color
and drift like open wings
of butterflies spiraling down—
we sit in our makeshift hut
willfully transitory, dressed
with the fruit of harvest
pumpkins, apples and nuts.
This is the feast where we
are commanded to be glad,
to rejoice in the bounty of earth
fat or meager. We’re exposed.
Seldom do we sit or sleep
outside in this cooling time
as the earth plunges
toward darkness and ice.
We hear owls, the surviving
crickets, the rustling of fast
small life in the underbrush,
the padding of raccoons,
coywolves howling at the full moon
from down in the marsh.
It is a kind of nakedness
to strip off our houses
like snails left unprotected