The Hunger Moon: New and Selected Poems, 1980-2010

  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.