at feeders, pecking sunflower seeds
and millet through the snow: tulip red
cardinal, daffodil finch, larkspur jay,
the pansybed of sparrows and juncos, all hungry.
They too are planters of trees, spreading seeds
of favorites along fences. On the earth closed
to us all as a book in a language we cannot
yet read, the seeds, the bulbs, the eggs
of the fervid green year await release.
Over them on February’s cold table I spread
a feast. Wings rustle like summer leaves.
Charoset
Sweet and sticky
I always make too much
at Pesach so I have
an excuse to eat you
all week.
Moist and red
the female treat
nothing at all like clay
for bricks, nothing
like mortar.
No, you are sweet as
a mouth kissing,
you are fragrant
with cinnamon
spicy as havdalah boxes.
Don’t go on too long,
you whisper sweetly.
Heed the children
growing restive, their
bellies growling.
You speak of pleasure
in the midst of remembered pain.
You offer the first taste
of the meal, promising joy
like a picnic on a stone
where long ago an ancestor
was buried, too long
ago to weep. We nod
and remembering is enough
to offer, like honey.
If much of what we must
recall is bitter, you
are the reminder that
joy too lights its candles
tonight in the mind.
Lamb Shank: Z’roah
It grosses out many of my friends.
They don’t eat meat, let alone
place it on a ritual platter.
I am not so particular, or more so.
Made of flesh and bone, liver
and sinew, salty blood and brain,
I know they weren’t ghosts who trekked
out of baked mud huts into the desert.
Blood was spilled, red and real:
first ours, then theirs. Blood
splashed on the doorposts proclaimed
in danger the rebellion within.
We are pack and herd animals.
One Jew is not a Jew, but we are
a people together, plural, joined.
We were made flesh and we bled.
And we fled, under the sign
of the slaughtered lamb to live
and die for each other. We are
meat that thinks and sings.
Matzoh
Flat you are as a doormat
and as homely.
No crust, no glaze, you lack
a cosmetic glow.
You break with a snap.
You are dry as a twig
split from an oak
in midwinter.
You are bumpy as a mud basin
in a drought.
Square as a slab of pavement,
you have no inside
to hide raisins or seeds.
You are pale as the full moon
pocked with craters.
What we see is what we get,
honest, plain, dry
shining with nostalgia
as if baked with light
instead of heat.
The bread of flight and haste
in the mouth you
promise, home.
Maggid
The courage to let go of the door, the handle.
The courage to shed the familiar walls whose very
stains and leaks are comfortable as the little moles
of the upper arm; stains that recall a feast,
a child’s naughtiness, a loud blattering storm
that slapped the roof hard, pouring through.
The courage to abandon the graves dug into the hill,
the small bones of children and the brittle bones
of the old whose marrow hunger had stolen;
the courage to desert the tree planted and only
begun to bear; the riverside where promises were
shaped; the street where their empty pots were broken.
The courage to leave the place whose language you learned
as early as your own, whose customs however dan-
gerous or demeaning, bind you like a halter
you have learned to pull inside, to move your load;
the land fertile with the blood spilled on it;
the roads mapped and annotated for survival.
The courage to walk out of the pain that is known
into the pain that cannot be imagined,
mapless, walking into the wilderness, going
barefoot with a canteen into the desert;
stuffed in the stinking hold of a rotting ship;
sailing off the map into dragons’ mouths,
Cathay, India, Siberia, goldeneh medina,
leaving bodies by the way like abandoned treasure.
So they walked out of Egypt. So they bribed their way
out of Russia under loads of straw; so they steamed
out of the bloody smoking charnelhouse of Europe
on overloaded freighters forbidden all ports—
out of pain into death or freedom or a different
painful dignity, into squalor and politics.
We Jews are all born of wanderers, with shoes
under our pillows and a memory of blood that is ours
raining down. We honor only those Jews who changed
tonight, those who chose the desert over bondage
who walked into the strange and became strangers
and gave birth to children who could look down
on them standing on their shoulders for having
been slaves. We honor those who let go of every-
thing but freedom, who ran, who revolted, who fought,
who became other by saving themselves.
Coming up on September
White butterflies, with single
black fingerpaint eyes on their wings
dart and settle, eddy and mate
over the green tangle of vines
in Labor Day morning steam.
The year grinds into ripeness
and rot, grapes darkening,
pears yellowing, the first
Virginia creeper twining crimson,
the grasses, dry straw to burn.
The New Year rises, beckoning
across the umbrellas on the sand.
I begin to reconsider my life.
What is the yield of my impatience?
What is the fruit of my resolve?
Now is the time to let the mind
search backward like the raven loosed
to see what can feed us. Now,
the time to cast the mind forward
to chart an aerial map of the months.
The New Year is a great door
that stands across the evening and Yom
Kippur is the second door. Between them
are song and silence, stone and clay pot
to be filled from within myself.
I will find there both ripeness and rot,
what I have done and undone,
what I must let go with the waning days
and what I must take in. With the last
tomatoes, we harvest the fruit of our lives.
Nishmat
When night slides under with the last dimming star
and the red sky lightens between the trees,
and the heron glides tipping heavy wings in the river,
when crows stir and cry out their harsh joy,
and swift creatures of the night run to
ward their burrows,
and the deer raises her head and sniffs the freshening air,
and the shadows grow more distinct and then shorten,
then we rise into the day still clean as new snow.
The cat washes its paw and greets the day with gratitude.
Leviathan salutes breaching with a column of steam.
The hawk turning in the sky cries out a prayer like a knife.
We must wonder at the sky now thin as a speckled eggshell,
that now piles up its boulders of storm to crash down,
that now hangs a furry grey belly into the street.
Every day we find a new sky and a new earth
with which we are trusted like a perfect toy.
We are given the salty river of our blood
winding through us, to remember the sea and our
kindred under the waves, the hot pulsing that knocks
in our throats to consider our cousins in the grass
and the trees, all bright scattered rivulets of life.
We are given the wind within us, the breath
to shape into words that steal time, that touch
like hands and pierce like bullets, that waken
truth and deceit, sorrow and pity and joy,
that waste precious air in complaints, in lies,
in floating traps for power on the dirty air.
Yet holy breath still stretches our lungs to sing.
We are given the body, that momentary kibbutz
of elements that have belonged to frog and polar
bear, corn and oak tree, volcano and glacier.
We are lent for a time these minerals in water
and a morning every day, a morning to wake up,
rejoice and praise life in our spines, our throats,
our knees, our genitals, our brains, our tongues.
We are given fire to see against the dark,
to think, to read, to study how we are to live,
to bank in ourselves against defeat and despair
that cool and muddy our resolves, that make us forget
what we saw we must do. We are given passion
to rise like the sun in our minds with the new day
and burn the debris of habit and greed and fear.
We stand in the midst of the burning world
primed to burn with compassionate love and justice,
to turn inward and find holy fire at the core,
to turn outward and see the world that is all
of one flesh with us, see under the trash,
through the smog, the furry bee in the apple blossom,
the trout leaping, the candles our ancestors lit for us.
Fill us as the tide rustles into the reeds in the marsh.
Fill us as rushing water overflows the pitcher.
Fill us as light fills a room with its dancing.
Let the little quarrels of the bones and the snarling
of the lesser appetites and the whining of the ego cease.
Let silence still us so you may show us your shining
and we can out of that stillness rise and praise.
from
Colors Passing Through Us
No one came home
1.
Max was in bed that morning, pressed
against my feet, walking to my pillow
to kiss my nose, long and lean with aqua-
marine eyes, my sun prince who thought
himself my lover. He was cream and golden
orange, strong willed, lord of the other
cats and his domain. He lay on my chest
staring into my eyes. He went out at noon.
He never came back. A smear of blood
on the grass at the side of the road
where we saw a huge coywolf the next
evening. We knew he had been eaten
yet we could not know. We kept looking
for him, calling him, searching. He
vanished from our lives in an hour. My cats
have always died in old age, slowly
with abundant warning. Not Max.
He left a hole in my waking.
2.
A woman leaves her children in day care,
goes off to her secretarial job
on the 100th floor, conscientious always
to arrive early, because she needs the money
for her children, for health insurance,
for rent and food and clothing and fees
for all the things kids need, whose father
has two new children and a great lawyer.
They are going to eat chicken that night
she has promised, and the kids talk of that
together, fried chicken with adobo, rice
and black beans, food rich as her love.
The day is bright as a clean mirror.
3.
His wife has morning sickness so does
not rise for breakfast. He stops for coffee,
a yogurt, rushing for the 8:08 train.
Ignoring the window, he writes his five
pages, the novel that is going to make
him famous, cut him loose from the desk
where he is chained to the phone
eight to ten hours, making cold calls.
In his head, naval battles rage. He
has been studying Midway, the Coral
Sea, Guadalcanal. He can recite
tonnage, tides, the problems with torpedoes.
For five years, he has prepared.
His makeshift office in the basement
is lined with books and maps. His book
will sing with bravery and error.
The day is blue and whistles like a robin.
4.
His father was a fireman and his brother.
He once imagined being a rapper
but by the end of high school, he knew
it was his calling, it was his family way.
As there are trapeze families, clans
who perform with tigers or horses,
the Irish travelers, tinkers, Gypsies,
those born to work the earth of their farm,
and those who inherit vast fortunes
built of the bones of others, so families
inherit danger and grace, the pursuit
of the safety of others before their own.
The morning smelled of the river,
of doughnuts, of coffee, of leaves.
5.
When a man fell into the molten steel
the company would deliver an ingot
to bury. Something. Where I live
on the Cape, lost at sea means no body.
You can’t bury a coffin length of sea
water. There are stones in our grave
yards with lists of names, the sailors
from ships gone down in a storm.
MIA means no body, no answer,
hope that is hopeless, the door
that can never be quite closed.
Lives are broken off like tree limbs
in a storm. Other lives simply dissolve
like salt in warm water and there is
no shadow on the pavement, no trace.
They puff into nothing. We can’t believe.
We die still expecting an answer.
6.
Los desparecidos. Did we notice?
Did we care? In Chile, funded,
assisted by the CIA, a democratic
government was torn down and thousands
brought into a stadium and never seen
again. Reports of torture, reports of graves
in the mountains, bodies dumped at sea
reports of your wife, your son, your
father arrested and then vanished
like cigarette smoke, gone like
a whisper you aren’t quite sure you
heard, a living person who must, who
must be somewhere, anywh
ere, lost,
wounded, boxed in a cell, in exile,
under a stone, somewhere, bones,
a skull, a button, a wisp of cloth.
In Argentina, the women marched
for those who had disappeared.
Did we notice? That happened
in those places, those other places
where people don’t speak English,
eat strange spicy foods, have dictators
or Communists or sambas or goas.
They didn’t count. We didn’t count
them or those they said had been
there alive and now who knew?
Not us. The terror has come home.
Will it make us better or worse?
7.
When will we understand what terrorists
never believe, that we are all
precious in our loving, all tender
in our flesh and webbed together?
That no one should be torn
out of the fabric of friends and family,
the sweet and sour work of loving,
burnt anonymously, carelessly
because of nothing they ever did
because of hatred they never knew
because of nobody they ever touched
or left untouched, turned suddenly
to dust on a perfect September
morning bright as a new apple
when nothing they did would
ever again make any difference.
Photograph of my mother sitting on the steps
My mother who isn’t anyone’s
just her own intact and yearning
self complete as a birch tree
sits on the tenement steps.