This morning as the white fog clears
I count the budding, lime-green fruit.
This July will mark five years.
Your sister’s well. She’s changed careers.
Your younger sister’s thriving too.
This morning as the white fog clears,
Do you know? Can you hear?
I launched a book to good reviews.
This July will mark five years.
I keep a strand of your blonde hair,
your Warwick bass, your book of Yeats.
This morning as the white fog clears,
Long solitude is a gradual
drawing inward, going deeper,
like autumn bulbs
snuggling into the soil,
marinating in darkness.
When the isolation ends,
do not hurry the process.
First the shy, green shoot,
then the tentative tip
of a fragile stalk arises
to carry a bud opening
slowly, in its own time.
How unpromising you seemed:
frostbitten, forlorn, blanketed in snow.
Dead leaves humped and left to rot
in a forgotten corner of the garden
where you had feasted summerlong
on sun and rain.
With what reckless hope I carried you
to a dark and silent space inside;
caressed your withered brown and peeling skin,
your pale and gravid bulb
neck-deep in soil,
half believing that the dead return.
I am familiar with this should not be.
Although I’ve tried to brush it off, its stench
of weariness and fault and lethargy
comes off my skin, runs from my veins; it’s drenched
in accusation, and tastes like shame. I see
it etched upon my neighbors’ faces, the loud
refrain: This should not be. This should not be.
And yet it masks itself in something proud.
Start with the thin wisp
of hope some stranger hocked
in a hospital room while you waited—
heart pressed to chest—for your father
to die. Breathe in. Decades have skipped
to this beat with someone else dipping hope’s
thread into the tiny creek at your wrist,
your fear swimming upstream to the damaged
cavern you inherited. Breathe out. Papa, I hear
your rhythm, the hum of deceptive rest,
the steady syllables of persistence.
What will hope find with its tiny eye,
I tell him my favorite poet went blind at 43,
some think from the same condition as mine.
What good fortune that I can prevent such a
loss, unlike poor Milton whose eyes flickered
for years before they burned out like a candle
in middle age. How I’ve felt my age mostly
in my eyes, as if they are the center of my gravity,
carrying the weight of getting old like a pair of
sore shoulders. So much looking has made me
see less, I say, like reading a digital clock in the sun.
we count
we matter
counting us
by country
numbered
jew by jew
all pass
beneath their rod
not just Poland’s
million three
and some tens
or is that hundreds
of thousands more
jew by jew
Albania’s two
barely hundreds
jew by jew
they matter too
by two
our numbers
known
inscribed
reckoned
totaled
and final
to be sure
never
our names
never
our faces
Darkness frees me to stand nightgowned
on the porch, watch
the dogs merge into shadow,
snuffle, pee, reappear.
I stretch, inhale summer’s warm weight,
imagine staying in this spot
while what has to be done
swirls by undone.
I imagine a taproot growing down my spine,
out my feet, through the porch floor
and deep underground,
rootlets reaching all directions.
Imagine remaining here so long
I fade from sight, although
everyone crossing this portal
pauses as they pass through my arms.
in the grocery store tonight
the persnickety cashier
smiled at me as though I were
a so-loved friend she knew
she would not see again
the sun was going down
the sky was pink and full of wind
O world I want to take you
in my arms: the trees the colors
the seas full of pufferfish
every warm and frightened
animal body that relies on the
rhythm two lungs make to go on
being what it is