Poem With Refrains

The opening scene. The yellow, coal-fed fog
Uncurling over the tainted city river,
A young girl rowing and her anxious father
Scavenging for corpses. Funeral meats. The clever
Abandoned orphan. The great athletic killer
Sulking in his tent. As though all stories began
With someone dying.

When her mother died,
My mother refused to attend the funeral–
In fact, she sulked in her tent all through the year
Of the old lady’s dying. I don’t know why:
She said, because she loved her mother so much
She couldn’t bear to see the way the doctors,
Or her father, or–someone–was letting her mother die.
“Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet;
Haste you, sad notes, fall at her flying feet.”

She fogs things up, she scavenges the taint.
Possibly that’s the reason I write these poems.

But they did speak: on the phone. Wept and argued,
So fiercely one or the other often cut off
A sentence by hanging up in rage–like lovers,
But all that year she never saw her face.

They lived on the same block, four doors apart.
“Absence my presence is; strangeness my grace;
With them that walk against me is my sun.”

“Synagogue” is a word I never heard,
We called it shul, the Yiddish word for school.
Elms, terra-cotta, the ocean a few blocks east.
“Lay institution”: she taught me we didn’t think
God lived in it. The rabbi is just a teacher.

But what about the hereditary priests,
Descendants of the Cohanes of the Temple,
Like Walter Holtz–I called him Uncle Walter,
When I was small. A big man with a face
Just like a boxer dog or a cartoon sergeant.
She told me whenever he helped a pretty woman
Try on a shoe in his store, he’d touch her calf
And ask her, “How does that feel?” I was too little
To get the point but pretended to understand.
“Desire, be steady; hope is your delight,
An orb wherein no creature can ever be sorry.”

She didn’t go to my bar mitzvah, either.
I can’t say why: she was there, and then she wasn’t.
I looked around before I mounted the steps
To chant that babble and the speech the rabbi wrote
And there she wasn’t, and there was Uncle Walter
The Cohane frowning with his doggy face:
“She’s missing her own son’s musaf.” Maybe she just
Doesn’t like rituals. Afterwards, she had a reason
I don’t remember. I wasn’t upset: the truth
Is, I had decided to be the clever orphan
Some time before. By now, it’s all a myth.
What is a myth but something that seems to happen
Always for the first time over and over again?
And ten years later, she missed my brother’s, too.
I’m sorry: I think it was something about a hat.
“Hot sun, cool fire, tempered with sweet air,
Black shade, fair nurse, shadow my white hair;
Shine, sun; burn, fire; breathe, air, and ease me.”

She sees the minister of the Nation of Islam
On television, though she’s half-blind in one eye.
His bow tie is lime, his jacket crocodile green.
Vigorously he denounces the Jews who traded in slaves,
The Jews who run the newspapers and the banks.
“I see what this guy is mad about now,” she says,
“It must have been some Jew that sold him the suit.”
“And the same wind sang and the same wave whitened,
And or ever the garden’s last petals were shed,
In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened.”

But when they unveiled her mother’s memorial stone,
Gathered at the graveside one year after the death,
According to custom, while we were standing around
About to begin the prayers, her car appeared.
It was a black car; the ground was deep in snow.
My mother got out and walked toward us, across
The field of gravestones capped with snow, her coat
Black as the car, and they waited to start the prayers
Until she arrived. I think she enjoyed the drama.
I can’t remember if she prayed or not,
But that may be the way I’ll remember her best:
Dark figure, awaited, attended, aware, apart.
“The present time upon time passëd striketh;
With Phoebus’s wandering course the earth is graced.

The air still moves, and by its moving, cleareth;
The fire up ascends, and planets feedeth;
The water passeth on, and all lets weareth;
The earth stands still, yet change of changes breedeth.”