PUFF
Somehow our grandfather’s old smoking cabinet
which held playing cards and pipes
has ended up in my brother’s guest bedroom
a thousand miles from Union Boulevard
where men dragged bundled laundry
in heavy carts down the street before dawn.
I feel startled each time I see it, expecting
the crisp dachshund who lived inside
and puffed smoke rings, doughnuts rising
from his tiny white cigarette—how did he get away?
Our grandfather’s only toy.
They all ran, the gingham aprons and funnels,
the clock with an honest face.
Now we weigh an hour for a space
belonging to us.
Once it all belonged to us.
Our grandfather’s long chair, the slope
of his arm resting as he slept.
He had German words inside his tongue.
He lit a cigarette for the dog with a squat body
and leaned back.
The rings said Zero Zero Zero
rising into the shades
drawn shut in the daytime.
Zero against tears.
Zero against assorted sandwich cookies
in frilled cups.
Zero against the broom and the saltshaker
and the Dutch cleanser aching in the cracks of the tiles.
We went home to a street called Harvey
wanting the thing which could not happen.
The dog thought it could happen.
Our grandfather who lit the match
carried a hat in his hands.
Where is his bed? His lamp?
*
I am confident the street called Harvey
lives in the zippered compartment of my purse.
It is mine forever. No one could steal it.
Giving me everything I go by,
my dictionary for pine and blame and snow.
On another street called Salah Eddin, a shopkeeper
called out, Your father was the most handsome man
in Jerusalem when he left!
Tears for the men and women
who leave the places that know them.
For the streets we cannot fix
and the gray school copybooks,
weeks plotted neatly in Arabic
as if days were really square.
We marched from Tuesday to Wednesday cleanly.
Streets were the blood of our bodies;
and just as you could say veins or arteries
carried red or blue depending on whether
they were coming or going, so we each traveled
our streets coming and going at exactly the same moment—
cells, scraps, puffs of living smoke.
