Category: Poetry

Every spring my husband and I discuss
the long-dead animals in the Cadbury commercial
running since we were kids: pig, cat, lion, turtle,
bunny. The wrong animals audition
to become the clucking bunny. This is the American
symbol of Easter, which I didn’t grow up with,
except for jelly beans and chocolate. (When my father
was a boy he would use a chocolate bunny’s head
as a goblet for his milk.) Instead I had the ten plagues,
parsley dipped in saltwater, buttered and salted matzoh,
opened door. Judaism is all about the symbols
and the stories and the food and the funny-sad. The minor key.
The tragic violin and exuberant clarinet, the klezmer absurd.

Vegetarians, my family put a Milk-Bone on our seder plate.
The Passover seder is the story of enslavement and then freedom,
and never forgetting that there were those who hated us
from whom we had to flee. And that when oppressors die,
we must not rejoice in their human pain. Sure, sure,
but who wouldn’t cheer as tyrants fall, as the waters
whale-gulp them down. Saltwater means tears, food is a story
of survival, and parsley means the green coming back to the yard.
The seder means, Here is who hated us and tried to kill us
and here we are still. Now, my sister chops apples and nuts,
brings the haroset in the yellow bowl that Stanley, our terrier,
once ate from. He’s there, just outside my dad’s kitchen,
our perennial digger and yard escapee, thief and planter of dolls
whose miniature limbs would protrude from the dirt, the tiny undead.

Stanley sleeps under the yard and not alone, long ago buried
and returning to us with the trees and grass and apples and spring.
We will not forget. I will not forget Charna, my grandma’s spunky friend,

jovial baker of mandel bread, and how she had survived the camps.

Grinning, she divulged to me and my sister how she told
the Nazis to their faces that they needed more food, thicker soup,
and her demands were met. What did she give up in negotiating this,
and what did she earn, a secret skeleton of steel and courage and love.

We also learned that the women fashioned and passed around
a bloody menstrual pad as protection, to try to ward off rape
by crafting the guards’ disgust. What seeds existed in her
that nudged her to ask Nazis for anything, to scavenge fabric
and blood and deliver it from woman to woman, clutched and folded,
a love letter, a ballad about generosity and pain, lantern-bright.

Where does this bravery in the midst of horror
come from, and how can we get more. Why is this night
different from all other nights, a question we ask ourselves
every year, when we should ask, How is this time different
from all other times, how is this agony different from other agonies.

When someone suffers, the Jew also suffers,
says the Passover story. And we want this to be true.
But between suffering and safety, there is a heavy door.
Closed. On this side, we eat apples and chocolate
and eggs full of candied yolk and drink simulated tears.
On the other side, all we can barely look at or hold in our
minds, the flame-ravaged house we could be chased from,
the thirst and loneliness of the exiled, the small hands
reaching up from yard’s cold mud that we see silhouetted
in the twilight and call broadleaf, dollarweed, thistle.

 

Mother wore a nightgown and peignoir, the white filmy kind,
walked barefoot out the front door and into our back yard
to sit in her crescent-moon-shaped rose garden,
her tangled hair caught in the rattan chair.

 

Those were the days when she got out of bed before noon.

 

O Etoile de Hollande, her favorite deep red rose—so fragrant.
Did she imagine it could be heaven, as she sat motionless
with her breakfast tray, melba toast, the loose tea leaves
floating in the china pot?

 

When I was in third grade my father paid me to make his breakfast
before he went to work early in the morning.
Bacon, toast, fried eggs, coffee—I served him
at the somber mahogany table
where he ate alone, wearing his Air Force uniform.

 

Much later, when my parents moved again,
there was no rose garden.
On good days, she climbed a stunted apple tree
and set her tray on the low gnarled branch in front of her.

 

My father pointed to the tree when I came home from college once.

 

When she came into an inheritance
she spent the cash on trips to Ireland and some Greek islands,
going by herself, never told me, and invested the rest
with hopes of getting rich but the broker swindled her.

 

Gone, except for this picture she kept of wildflowers in Delos—

 

She used to sing—I am weary unto death—

 

Elegy for Recording the Light

with “Victor Jacquemont Holding a Parasol, 1865” & a line from bell hooks

 

Do you ever get sad thinking that all the dogs

in old paintings are dead? ​More helpless

than the past is the bruise that carves

it into canvas & the root of martyr,

 

I learned, is witness. So I ​practice saying no

to dusk’s orange heel, poised above

my throat. As if existence has a bloodthirst

for testimony. As if stillness is a eulogy

 

I’m working up the bravery for.

Contemplating death leads us

back to love. It’s not that the dark

is thicker, but that in the meteoric

 

hours under a soup’s-ladle
of Orionids, I’m embedded with need

to pass sunflower atoms from my tongue

to your tongue. There are so many people

 

I will never see old: Most. My father

hiding in the blackberry field

lacing the sun to his ghost boots. After

you tell me about the island mangroves,

 

I gift you a jar of blackberry jam
from my grandmother’s land & remember

Monet’s admission that while

watching someone he loved

 

die, he spent up the time analyzing

the pigments in her eyelids, deciding

how to paint them. We​ can only learn

so much from squatting in the dirt

 

with capillaries hung like dried roses

to preserve in the shroud

of pages. I’ll spend a life failing

to befriend the fear that all of this glows

 

& ends: a faint slash of tenderness

before the sorrow festival.

 

 

Tallahassee Spring

I

 

Passing a rare live deer at the side
of the highway, far enough
in the grass to pretend it doesn’t know

 

the twisted necks & blank eyes

its kind are prone to, a lineage of split livers

ant-eaten like cupcakes

 

My mother says possums kill
by tunneling up through a creature’s ass

It’s true​. Kick a dead calf, a possum

peeks sheepishly out the bloated mouth

 

Hold my hand ten more miles & I’ll stop

myself from telling you, again, about the dead

bird in my Kentucky yard & the other
who landed to stare. Unflinching

 

Even the rabbits are hiding
long-eared ghosts—someone they swallowed

for safekeeping. What if we chose to forget

 

the impulsive deployment of knives, if we believed

honeybees were the only blameless beings

 

II

 

Birds & more birds
plow the bluegray morning
The shivery opulence with which we split

into a nest of hotbreathed animals

 

Splayed like iguanas in the daylight
Sometimes you are touching me
& I am thinking up ways to get ovened into dirt

 

Witnesses, too, are actors
in the grieving process. Driving
into Florida’s oblong belly, I memorized

new spells for desire: tying hair strands

around a bay leaf, then burying it

 

with both hands in red mud. ​If you have someone

who will bury with you, what we call tenderness

is simply the condition

 

Again I lay at your back, wearing

the face of the wolves that ate me

 

III

 

Who will tell the bees
the names of all the dead?

 

My friend’s mother says

she packed the hive in wool

 

but within days

she found them frozen

 

in breathless Arkansas winter

Huddled in a ball of ice

 

IV

 

When a leaf sprouts does it name itself

Preparation For The Rotting

 

If you love someone why not make them happy

without you

 

V

 

There is nothing so alive as crying
under purgatorial dawn filtered
through the clanking brogue of a train tunneling backwards

 

Watching briary porches on the brick tenements
slide away from us like futures
The whole sweet metal sow, inside its glass stomachs

I grow fat with wonder

 

How potato chip bags & dogs & daylight are all

made of dark space matter & us too, yes, your finger

 

hooked through my finger like the tiniest window latch, my heart

clinking between your teeth,
the smallest unlatched window

 

VI

 

I feel dying.​ Small children say this
Hothouse as fuck this Tallahassee spring
Slivers of broken lightbulb glittering the bedsheets

 

There was a woman sleeping in the road

that wraps around the cemetery
A stranger

 

Green green bottomland

wilding my sorrow
with unrelenting blooms

 

Let us look on one another
with the joyful urgency of cakebearers