My time in better dresses
I remember job hunting in my shoddy
and nervous working class youth,
how I had to wear nylons and white
gloves that were dirty in half an hour
for jobs that barely paid for shoes.
Don’t put down Jew, my mother
warned, just say Protestant, it
doesn’t commit you to anything.
Ads could still say “white” and
in my childhood, we weren’t.
I worked in better dresses in Sam’s
cut-rate department store, $3.98
and up. I wasn’t trusted to sell.
I put boxes together, wrapped,
cleaned out dressing rooms.
My girlfriend and I bought a navy
taffeta dress with cutout top, wore it
one or the other to parties, till it failed
my sophistication test. The older
“girls” in sales, divorced, sleek,
impressed me, but the man in charge
I hated, the way his eyes stroked,
stripped, discarded. How he docked
our pay for lateness. How he sucked
on his power like a piece of candy.
Come fly without me
A ship in a bottle looks stately
if arcane and somewhat archaic.
But two hundred people crammed
into a flying bottle breathing
filthy air is disgusting.
Come stuff your carry-on
into a mail slot so you can be
parked on the tarmac for eight
hours while the toilet overflow
runs down the aisle. Hungry?
Buy 10 stale potato chips
for six dollars. Come ride
with your knees digging hard
into your chin. When the guy
in front leans back, your tray
will slam your stomach. Fly
the germy skies inhaling TB.
The pilots have been awake
for seventeen hours and can’t
see the controls.
The plane was last serviced
by drunk mechanics who used
to fix pinball machines. Enjoy
your delayed overbooked flight
as the airlines enjoy your money.
These bills are long unpaid
To predict disaster, to invoke treachery
and malice, to spin tales of rotten
luck to make it not happen:
that doesn’t work.
The wind is still rising with hail
in its teeth. The waves are piling up
then spilling way, way back baring
bottom you’ve never seen.
There’s ashes in the wind, darling,
a taste of ashes in our food
ashes on our lips in bed
eyes blinded with ash.
There’s a mortgage on my spine
I cannot pay. Somebody has
bought my teeth and wants them
out tomorrow for dice.
There are real monsters under
the bed, hungry for blood. They own
the land this house stands on
to stripmine for coal.
Santa isn’t coming. The bounty
hunter is. There’s a lien on your
ass and the bank is itchy to fore
close your future.
If you’re going to stand, get up.
If you’re going to fight, get moving.
Nothing comes to those who wait
but hunger’s claws
digging into the soft belly. If you
value your blood, fight to keep
it in your veins. You have nothing
to lose but your life
and it was sold to them decades
ago by your parents’ parents.
Their greed is endless. Your
patience shouldn’t be.
Hope is a long, slow thing
“I became a feminist but I didn’t
get it all so I have committed to
the Church of Perpetual Subservience.”
“I protested, demonstrated but still
the war went on, so I have realized
politics is useless and have joined
marvelous luncheons.” “I made phone
calls for my candidate but little
happened so I’ll never vote again.”
But progress is never individual.
A wave crashes on our shore, traveling
all the way from Africa, storming,
eroding the cliff, grinding it down
but the same water is not what moved.
We are droplets in a wave. Maybe
I cannot with my efforts displace
a rock but the energy of a movement
can force it from the way. Look back:
My great-grandmother was killed
in a pogrom. My grandmother gave
birth to eleven children in a tenement
eating potatoes only sometimes. My
mother had to leave school in tenth grade
to work as a chambermaid that salesmen
chased around dirty beds. Nothing
changed by itself but was changed by work.
History records no progress people
did not sweat and dare to push. A long
“we” is the power that moves the rock.
IV
Working at it
The late year
I like Rosh Hashanah late,
when the leaves are half burnt
umber and scarlet, when sunset
marks the horizon with slow fire
and the black silhouettes
of migrating birds perch
on the wires davening.
I like Rosh Hashanah late
when all living are counting
their days toward death
or sleep or the putting by
of what will sustain them—
when the cold whose tendrils
translucent as a jellyfish
and with a hidden sting
just brush our faces
at twilight. The threat
of frost, a premonition,
a warning, a whisper
whose words we cannot
yet decipher, but will.
I repent better in the waning
season when the blood
runs swiftly and all creatures
look keenly about them
for quickening danger.
Then I study the rock face
of my life, its granite pitted
and pocked and pickaxed,
eroded, discolored by sun
and wind and rain—
my rock emerging
from the veil of greenery
to be mapped, to be
examined, to be judged.
Erev New Years
This is my real new year’s eve,
not that mishmash of desperate
parties with somebody puking
on your shoes or passing out,
that night when amateur drunks
crash into telephone poles
or other drivers. Here I make
my real resolutions as I toss
breadcrumbs into the Herring
River as it pours into Wellfleet
Bay. I try, but some sins,
some failures I toss year after
year and still they lurk in me.
Every Rosh Hashanah I swear
to be less impatient, then fail,
but next year, fresh and sweet
marked with honey and apples,
surely I will correct myself.
My year opens its bronze doors
and I pass through into whatever
the Book holds and whatever
I make or unmake or pass by.
I walk int
o this new beginning
of a self still under construction.
Head of the year
Head of the year and time to use
our heads: to think deeply without
subterfuge, without excuses—flaking
them off the worn bones of last
year’s resolutions.
How pitiful they look now, remnants
of kavanah more like rags than
the skeletal foundation on which
we planned to build our forceful
and gracious new year.
Every Rosh Hashanah I make
some of the same resolves. Where
does that energy leak off to? Are
they just perfunctory gestures
at this new year?
Which resolves did I start carrying
out fresh and eager and then let
slide? Which were real only on
paper, Potemkin villages of the mind,
never made new—
nice facades I didn’t truly mean to
inhabit. Tomorrow as I do tashlich
let me make no paper promises
but carry these resolves into action
in this still sweet new year.
May the new year continue our joy
Apples and honey for the new year
but you are my year round sweet
apple. The apple of my eye, apple
of temptation and delight. My honey:
our lives together are full of work,
harvest from dirt and sweat, bounty
of work from the brain and the heart,
we’re each other’s wages and prize:
the seeds in every apple, the flower
and the pollen and the nectar
and the final ultimate honey
our bodies make and surrender.
I was never truly happy before you.
I was never truly whole before you.
Late that afternoon they come
At Yizkor my dead swim around me
schools of them flashing, then
slowly as one by one I honor them.
Mother, brother, bobbah, aunts,
uncles, cousins, I am here to say
one by one silently their names.
Friends of all the times of my life,
those who left young, those whom
death took after illness ravaged them;
those whose names shine for all,
those who lived hidden by poverty,
those whom you might call ordinary
but not to those who loved them.
My cats come too, even if you
believe they lack souls. All those
I’ve loved and cherished circle
in the fading light of Yizkor and I
pray, blessed be their memories.
As long as I live let me pause to
remember, let me pay them a prayer
placed like a stone on their graves.
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 feel 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 failed promises—
their broken glass in our hands.
The wall of cold descends
Near the end of our annual solstice party
as guests were rummaging through the pile
for their coats and hugging many goodbyes
the very first snow of the year began
to eddy down in big flat flakes.
It was cold enough to stick, with the grass
poking through and then buried.
Now the ground gives it back
under the low ruddy sun that sits
on the boughs of the pine like a fox
if red foxes could climb. The cats
crowd the windows for its touch.
The Wolf Moon seemed bigger than
the sun, almost brighter as last night
it turned the snow ghostly.
Now it too wanes. The nub end
of the year when all northern
cultures celebrate fire and light.
Tonight we’ll take the first two candles
to kindle one from the other.
When we go out after dark, our
eyes seek lights that bore holes
in the thick black like the pelt
of a huge hairy monster, a grizzly
who devours the warm-blooded.
We are kin with the birds who huddle
in evergreens, who crowd feeders,
kin with the foxes and their prey, kin
with all who shiver this night, home-
less or housed, clutching or alone
under the vast high dome of night.
How she learned
A friend was an only child, she thought,
until sorting through her mother’s things
after the frail old woman died—who
had borne Anna late in life, a miracle,
a blessing, she was always told—
Anna found a greying photograph.
Her aunt who escaped Poland
in ’37 had saved and given it
to her younger sister who barely
survived Nordhausen working inside
the mountain, skinny almost-ghost.
Anna recognized her mother, decades
younger, but against her side was
pressed a girl not Anna. Scrawled
on the back, Feygelah und Perl.
Who was Feygelah? Her aunt bore
only sons. This girl was four or five
with long light braids, her legs
locked together in a shy fit. Who?
There were letters back and forth,
Boston to Krakow. She sat reading
them, puzzling out the handwriting,
the Yiddish. She had a dictionary
but even then, it took her late into
the evening. Anna had a sister.
A sister vanished into smoke.
A sister torn from her mother,
murdered, burnt. Anna sat numb.
She was the replacement for
a girl whose name her mother
could not speak. The weight
of history pressed on Anna’s chest
that night and finally she wept—
mourning the sister never known
and her mother’s decades of silence.
Working at it
So much in Tanakh is a mixed
bag, a tangled message. Eliyahu
and Elisha come to the Jordan;
the elder prophet strikes the water
and parts it for them. He makes
a safe dry road through what
would drown them. We all try
to do that for those we cherish.
Elisha resists show—fiery
horses and chariot—and witnesses
the whirlwind and is rewarded
with Eliyahu’s spiritual power.
He too can part the waters.
We hope for the gifts our mentors
have tried to teach
us, to carry on.
When he travels, boys mock
his bald head and he sends bears
to savage forty-two children.
What can I learn from this? To take
myself seriously into violence?
We pick and choose what to
cherish of those tales, our minds
picking at them for spiritual sense
so we can part the dangerous waters
of our time to cross our Jordans.
The order of the seder
The songs we join in
are beeswax candles
burning with no smoke
a clean fire licking at the evening
our voices small flames quivering.
The songs string us like beads
on the hour. The ritual is
its own melody that leads us
where we have gone before
and hope to go again, the comfort
of year after year. Order: