From the First Weeks in New York, If My Grandfather Could Have Written a Postcard
if he had the words, the language. If he could spell. If he wasn’t selling pencils but knew how to use them, make the shapes for words he doesn’t know. If he was not weighed down with a pack that made red marks on his shoulder, rubbed the skin that grew pale under layers of wet wool, he might have taken the brown wrapping paper and tried to write three lines in Russian to a mother or aunt he might never see again. But instead, too tired to wash hair smelling of burning leaves he walked thru, maybe he curled in a blue quilt, all he had of the cottage he left that night running past straw...
Read MoreI Think of My Grandfather
on a cramped ship headed toward Ellis Island. Fog, fog horns for a lullaby. The black pines, a frozen pear. Straw roofs on fire. If there were postcards from the sea there might have been a Dear Hannah or Mama, hand colored with salt. I will come and get you. If the branches are green, pick the apples. When I write next, I will have a pack on my back, string and tin. I dream about the snow in the mountains. I never liked it but I dream of you tying a scarf around my hair, your words that white...
Read MoreSomewhere Near Vilna
Past where the train goes where snow mounds in the shape of caves and ovens, my father is holding one hand near an eye, tracing the sun’s rouge light in snow. Later no one will be sure why he can’t see, moves thru shadows with just his left eye. A chicken that will bleed over straw by noon the next day, nests near the foot of the bed his mother made of evergreen and patched wood. Cold spreads like oil or terror. An Aunt talks of the year there was no thaw, her skin cracked, rough as a cat’s tongue, reads to my father in candle light of a country with no snow where, if my father...
Read MorePhotograph
My father sister and I in the trees with our hair blowing. My sister as usual has something in her hands and grins in a way no one could say no to, dancing in restaurants until she pulls in to herself at 19 like the turtles she collects. But here she’s the sweet pouter, my father’s pockets bulge with things, the gum he’ll give us in the brown chair later reading the funnies. I’ve got a little pot and my arms are heavy, my father touches us both lightly as if he’s not sure we’re...
Read MoreApril Fog
The wind picks up the day it’s supposed to rise into the upper sixties. Clouds boil. The pond goes pewter. Ripples dark as basaltic lava. You can measure light. by what’s gone, throwing corn past crushed berries, the only light and the bellies of geese tipped to dive for those gold beads
Read More