and let the stars poke
into our skulls till we seem
to fall upward. How intimate
we are now with the night.
The full moon of Nisan
The full moon of Nisan pulls us
almost every Jew under the sky
to a table. Like a tide composed
of tiny rivulets we head
purposefully toward our seders
laden with the flat tasteless
bread of haste.
The moon when it rises looks
like strawberry ice cream.
Then it lightens to waxy cheese.
Then it soars pale and pitted
like matzoh, the old kind
round instead of square
dry and winking.
Nisan brings the matzoh moon
urging buds to open, urging
minds to fling their gates
wide on the night we become
slaves and then march out
to freedom past lintels
smeared with blood.
Peace in a time of war
A puddle of amber light
like sun spread on a table,
food flirting savor into the nose,
faces of friends, a vase
of daffodils and Dutch iris:
this is an evening of honey
on the tongue, cinnamon
scented, red wine sweet
and dry, voices rising
like a flock of swallows
turning together in evening
air. Darkness walls off
the room from what lies
outside, the fire and dust
and blood of war, bodies
stacked like firewood
burst like overripe melons.
Ceremony is a moat we have
crossed into a moment’s
harmony, as if the world paused—
but it doesn’t. What we must
do waits like coats tossed
on the bed, for us to rise
from this warm table
put on again and go out.
The cup of Eliyahu
In life you had a temper.
Your sarcasm was a whetted knife.
Sometimes you shuddered with fear
but you made yourself act no matter
how few stood with you.
Open the door for Eliyahu
that he may come in.
Now you return to us
in rough times, out of smoke
and dust that swirls blinding us.
You come in vision, you come
in lightning on blackness.
Open the door for Eliyahu
that he may come in.
In every generation you return
speaking what few want to hear
words that burn us, that cut
us loose so we rise and go again
over the sharp rocks upward.
Open the door for Eliyahu
that he may come in.
You come as a wild man,
as a homeless sidewalk orator,
you come as a woman taking the bima,
you come in prayer and song,
you come in a fierce rant.
Open the door for Eliyahu
that she may come in.
Prophecy is not a gift, but
sometimes a curse, Jonah
refusing. It is dangerous
to be right, to be righteous.
To stand against the wall of might.
Open the door for Eliyahu
that he may come in.
There are moments for each
of us when you summon, when
you call the whirlwind, when you
shake us like a rattle: Then we
too must become you and rise.
Open the door for Eliyahu
that we may come in.
The wind of saying
The words dance in the wind of saying.
They are leaves that crispen,
sere, turning to dust. As long
as that language runs its blood-
rich river through the tongues
of people, as long as grand
of old stories with bright new
words carpeting the air
into dreams, then the words
live like good bacteria
within our guts, feeding us.
We catch the letters and trap
them in books, pearlescent butterflies
pinned down. We fasten the letters
with nails to the white pages.
Most words dry finally to husks
even though dead languages
whisper, blown sand through
the dim corridors of library stacks.
Languages wither, languages
are arrested and die in prison,
stories are chopped off at the roots
like weeds, lullabies spill
on the floor and dry up.
Conquerors force their words
into the minds of their victims.
Our natural language is a scream.
Our natural language is a cry
rattling in the night. But tongues
are how we touch, how we reach,
how we teach, the spine of words.
Some New Poems
The low road
What can they do
to you? Whatever they want.
They can set you up, they can
bust you, they can break
your fingers, they can
burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can’t walk, can’t remember, they can
take your child, wall up
your lover. They can do anything
you can’t stop them
from doing. How can you stop
them? Alone, you can fight,
you can refuse, you can
take what revenge you can
but they roll over you.
Two people can keep each other
sane, can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation,
a committee, a wedge. With four
you can play bridge and start
an organization. With six
you can rent a whole house,
eat pie for dinner with no
seconds and hold a fund-raising party.
A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;
ten thousand, power and your own paper;
a hundred thousand, your own media;
ten million, your own country.
It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again after they said No,
it starts when you say We
and know who you mean, and each
day you mean one more.
The curse of Wonder Woman
Batman can suffer angst in his batcave,
pester his butler factotum with doubts,
question his adoption of Robin,
but Wonder Woman can never waver.
She must fight, fight, fight without
recompense. No 3 a.m. nitpicking
of a festering conscience for her.
Role models can’t stop to consider.
Role models can’t whine or take
to their beds with PMS or enjoy
a headache with chocolates
on the couch. Women are watching,
judging, waiting for the cracks
in the makeup to show. Role
models can’t enjoy a fling in Jamaica.
They don’t get vacations or spas.
People need and resent role models
with equal fervor. She’d like to
retire, but who
else can bounce
back bullets on a quest for justice?
She’s stuck in the spotlight impaled
by duty. Sometimes she half wishes
to fail and be replaced by some other
woman without sense to be afraid.
July Sunday 10 a.m.
We drink café au lait on the sunporch,
Puck has dozed off paws in the air
lying on the rumpled morning paper.
Through the screens, a scent of roses
and the repeated cry of a cardinal
shaped like a sickle. You wear only
red silk boxers. I wear my thinnest
nightgown. The air is heavy
on the rhododendrons as if they
had just been waxed.
Football for dummies
Among my husbands and lovers,
I had never before lived
with a sports fan. Hockey
he does not follow, but base-
ball, basketball, football all
in their seasons consume him.
I had to share something:
baseball is too slow. Basket-
ball goes on for months
and months, interminably,
a herd of skinny giants
running back and forth mys-
terious as a flock of swallows
wheeling together at twilight.
But football: it’s only sixteen
Sundays and maybe playoffs.
That seemed reasonable. I
bought a book. Now every
Sunday in season I stare
avidly while huge millionaires
collide like rival rhinoceros.
When we watch the Super
Bowl with groups of men
and I explain a nickel
back they gaze at me
with esoteric lust. I
look only at the screen.
Football, it is mine.
Murder, unincorporated
I am of the opinion that almost
anyone would kill for something—
an idea, a country on a map or
in the head, a god or goddess,
a lover, a child, a hovel, a home.
A stash of money or drugs,
a meal, a blanket, medicine,
personal morality as in kill
the bitch, a real Picasso
a mother, a father, prized
stallion, prize bull, a dog.
To stay out of prison, to cross
a border to safety, to cover
up a lie, a theft, to maintain
cover, to steal identity.
Because the gun was in
the drawer, the ax on the
table, the chance lay open
like a switchblade and temper
sparked a blaze only blood
could cool. Because
the sergeant said to.
Because the others did.
The happy man
Pierre-Joseph Redouté painted roses;
also succulents, lilies, rare tropical
imports, but most famously, roses.
He was from a family of journeymen
painters, never famous, portraits
to order, flattering of course,
church and abbey decorations.
But Redouté painted flowers. He
looked like a peasant, squarish
in body, strong with huge mishapen
hands, not what aristocrats or critics
expect. But Redouté painted flowers.
He ambled through courts, Marie
Antoinette’s play village at Versailles,
Revolution, Terror, Napoléon. Josephine’s
triumph and her divorce, Charles X,
Louis-Philippe, court painter to each
in turn unfailingly friendly, painting flowers.
His younger brother drew beetles
and reptiles instead of court ladies
or kings, but Redouté painted flowers.
Money came to him like rain to a garden.
He drank it in blindly, gave it to others,
spent it like the water it seemed.
Always more tomorrow. He grew old,
unfashionable. Moneylenders sucked
him dry but he never drooped. Flowers
were always calling. At the end poor
but busy, brush in hand he died smiling
as he painted a perfect white lily.
Collectors
Some people collect grudges
like stamps or rare coins.
They take out their prize holdings
to polish till they glow.
But after a while, it doesn’t work
any longer, so they need fresh
ones to cherish the way another
will groom a champion setter.
Friendships are expendable
as last decade’s palazzo pants.
Rejecting is more fun than
holding close. So on they go
their paths littered with torn
and discarded friendships,
like bones outside the den
of a fairy tale giant.
First sown
Peas are the first thing we plant
always. We lie full length
on the cold black earth and poke
holes in it for the wrinkled
old men of the seeds.
Nothing will happen for weeks.
Rain will soak them, a white
tablecloth of snow will cover
them and be whisked off.
The moon will sing to them:
open, loosen, let the pale
shoots break out. No,
they are pebbles, they sit
in the earth like false teeth.
They ignore the sweet sun.
Then one unlikely day
the soil cracks along miniature
faults and soon baby leaves
stick out their double heads
and we know we shall have peas.
Away with all that
Where the Herring River meets Wellfleet Bay
the tide carries brackish water out to sea.
I arrive with my pants pocket stuffed
with stale bread. As I tear off each piece
I name what I am praying will depart.
Envy and prejudice sink under their own
weight like hunks of granite. Impatience
darts out into the bay waters, vanishing
as a fish rises to gulp it. Procrastination,
sloth eddy back and forth at waves’ edge.
Conceit prances out on wave tops.
Anger and malice bounce off each other
and sink down onto the sand. Intention
never carried out simply comes apart.
It is all me. It is all I wish were not me.
Wishing won’t do it any more than old
bread can rid me of what I must pry
out of myself every day, intention
that wears through like an old runner
on stairs I must climb to the top.
If only I could discard my rotten parts
as simply as I toss these bits of bread
too hard to eat onto waves that push,
push, push my named sins to the bay,
to bigger bay, out into the world ocean.
All that remains
A pillar of salt would slowly dissolve
in the season of rains, as women
have so often melted from history
so many nameless, wife of,
daughter of, maidservant of.
Their faces peer out between
the black logs and squiggles
of Hebrew letters, as if through
bars. We were here too, they
whisper like pages turning,
pages on which their fates
are sometimes written, always
by others. The strongest ones,
Miriam, Deborah, hold their
names gripped in their teeth.
Diving through the letters
into the white light between
I seek them out, wife of,
daughter of, maidservant of—
their silence deafens me.
What comes next
After a hurricane the whine
of chainsaws cutting into downed trees.
After a blizzard, whiteout silence
then the cries of hungry birds.
After a loss, another kind
of silence when we are too weary
to cry, too numb to tackle
the list of things that must be done.
The force of what has happened
flattens us to old rugs
on which the pattern is only
memory and their use is past.
Where dreams come from
A girl slams the door of her little room
under the eaves where marauding squirrels
scamper overhead like herds of ideas.
She has forgotten to be grateful she has
finally a room with a door that shuts.
She is furious her parents don’t comprehend
why she wants to go to college, that place
of musical comedy fantasies and weekend
football her father watches, beer can
in hand. It is as if she announced I want
to journey to Iceland or Machu Picchu.
Nobody in their family goes to college.
Where do dreams come from? Do they
sneak in through torn screens at night
to light on the arm like mosquitoes?