Two books in Spanish
on the children of
the clouds, an electric
motor for a fan and no
fan blade, three spotted
eggs, uncracked. Bend
down and look: the eggs
are almost new. They glow
like the just born or
the just dead, feel
the heat as it passes
through your hand. Three
perfect shapes a thousand
sciences could not
improve, for sale to
anyone. A light snow
drifts down, perhaps
it’s only shards of
paper, falling from
city hall, perhaps it’s
light in tiny diamonds
meant to consecrate
the day or dirty it.
The keepers of this
shop—can we call them
shopkeepers, though in
the filthy air there’s
nothing here to keep
except their distance
and their stillness?—
are river people. You
can tell by the way
the lines swirl away
from their eyes and race
off in all directions,
you can tell by the way
the man squats and does
the BMT rumbles on its
way to an ocean these two
will never see again.
The street rocks; the man
and woman hold. Garter
and panty set bunched against
the cold, the black broken
teeth of an old comb,
a plastic, satin-lined
casket for fountain pens,
a dusting of snow or more
tired paper. All these
riches set out on a blanket
from Samarkand or Toledo
that bears in black
the outline of the great
bird beneath whose wings
we flew out of the fires
of morning. A bus hisses
past for the seventh time,
sighing. A cop stops and
talks to no one, and he
sighs too. The clouds go
on clawing overhead. Children
rise from the underground
or descend in streams from
the clouds. For a moment
there is music and then not,
Light drains from above and
runs like melted lead into
the open steaming vents.
Side by side these two stand
while the day passes or
an hour passes in the almost
new dark as the three eggs
hatch into smaller and newer
eggs and nobody buys.
When the young farm laborer
steals the roses for his wife
we know for certain he’ll find
her beyond their aroma
or softness. We can almost
feel with how soft a step
he approaches the cottage
there on the edge of the forest
darkening even before supper,
not wanting to give away
the surprise, which shall be his
only, for now she sleeps beyond
surprise in the long full,
dreamless sleep he will soon
pray for. And so they become
a bouquet for a grave, a touch
of rose in a gray and white
landscape. All this years ago
in the imagination of a poet
who would die before the book
was published. Did the thorns
puncture the young man’s fingers
as he pressed the short stems
through the knife blade? Did he
bleed on the snow like a man
in a film, on the tight buds,
on her face as he bent down
to take her breath? Did that
breath still smell of breakfast,
of raw milk and bread? What does
breath that doesn’t come smell of,
if it smells at all? If I went
to the window now and gazed
down at the city stretching
in clear winter sunlight past
the ruined park the children
never visit, out over the rooftops
of Harlem past the great bridge
to Jersey and the country lost
to me before I found it,
would I cry and for whom?
Half asleep in my chair, I hear
a voice quiver the windowpane,
the same high cry of fear I first
heard beside the Guadalquivir
when I wakened to wind and rain
and called out to someone not there
and heard an answer. That was Spain
twenty-six years ago. The voice hers,
my sister’s, and now it’s come again
to ask how we go on without her.
That night beside the great river
I dressed in the dark and alone
left my family and walked till dawn
came, freezing, on the eastern rim
of mountains. I found no answer,
or learned never to ask, for
the wind answers itself if you
wait long enough. It turns one way,
then another, the trees bend, they
rise, the long grasses wave and bow,
all the voices you’ve ever heard
you hear again until you know
you’ve heard nothing. And so I wait
motionless, and as the air calms
my small, lost sister grows quiet,
as shy as she was in her life.
I remember coming back that night
in Sevilla past the rail yards,
trying to hold on to each word
she’d spoken even as the words fled
from my mouth. The switch engines
steamed in the cold. The sentry
in a brown cap sat up to shake
himself awake, and with no fire,
no human cry and no bird song,
the day broke over everything.
My twin brother swears that at age thirteen
I’d take on anyone who called me kike
no matter how old or how big he was.
I only wish I’d been that tiny kid
who fought back through his tears, swearing
he would not go quietly. I go quietly
packing bark chips and loam into the rose beds,
while in his memory I remain the constant child
daring him to wrest Detroit from lean gentiles
in LaSalle convertibles and golf clothes
who step slowly into the world we have tainted,
and have their revenge. I remember none of this.
He insists, he names the drug store where I poured
a milkshake over the head of an Episcopalian
with quick fists as tight as croquet balls.
He remembers his license plate, his thin lips,
the exact angle at which this seventeen year old dropped
his shoulder to throw the last punch. He’s making
it up. Wasn’t I always terrified?
“Of course,” he tells me, “that’s the miracle,
you were even more scared than me, so scared
you went insane, you became a whirlwind,
an avenging angel.”
I remember planting
my first Victory Garden behind the house, hauling
dark loam in a borrowed wagon, and putting in
carrots, corn that never grew, radishes that did.
I remember saving for weeks to buy a tea rose,
a little stick packed in dirt and burlap,
my mother’s favorite. I remember the white bud
of my first peony that one morning burst
beside the mock orange that cost me 69¢.
(Fifty years later the orange is still there,
the only thing left beside a cage for watch dogs,
empty now, in what had become a tiny yard.)
I remember putting myself to sleep dreaming
of the tomatoes coming into fullness, the pansies
laughing in the spring winds, the magical wisteria
climbing along the garage, and dreaming of Hitler,
of firing a single shot from a foot away, one
that would tear his face into a caricature of mine,
tear stained, bloodied, begging for a moment’s peace.
My aunt Yetta sleeps, her mouth hanging open, her eyes
buried under a swirl of dark hair. When I rise
from bed I find her clothes scattered across
the flowered carpet. It’s Sunday, a boy’s voice
calls to me from the yard below, the voice of Harold Lux
impatient for play, urging me out into the city
we think is ours. From up here the elms glisten
in last night’s rain, the still pools on the pavement
give back a cloudless sky going gray. A single car
starts up next door, dies, starts again. The toolmaker
leaves for work shaking his head as though his hair
were a mop of fire. In her wool bathrobe his wife
stands on the lawn in cotton socks, one hand clutching
a hankie, the other waving at the empty street.
Then what? November darkness and the cold wind,
the first snow bowing the bare branches; that wind
dies into streams of melting ice racing toward the river.
Black walnut, elm, great spreading copper beech,
maple greening into leaf, the bare lots flowering,
morning after morning a perfect sky until I think
I see heaven waiting at the end of the block. I turn
back to Aunt Yetta. The clock says more than heaven.
I have searched through cartons of old pictures
for what remained of that day, for even the moment
after the street went quiet. I have gone for years
with one hand held out before me as a token
of my blindness. Smeared by a thumb print, Yetta
broods in bright sunlight off to one side while
the others lean forward, ignorant and laughing,
into a future that is fixed. The lake behind them
changed its name. Today it’s no more than a pond
I walk around each autumn looking for messages
among the fallen acorns and the beer cans
left by teenagers. Another engine fires, the air
rings with each precise explosion, and each image
vanishes into photography. When the children called
from the back seat, “Are we there yet? Are we there?”
what could we answer? We said the little we knew:
“We’re still here.” If you asked if Harold stands now
out in the decaying yard, faithful to the end,
breathing a name into the October air, what
could I do but shake my head and go dumb? Perhaps
it’s enough to say what I can. The toolmaker
wore his only suit, the light blue one, for days
after his wife ran off. I could say more. I could
say that one time I passed close he reached a dry hand
around the back of my neck, pulled me to him,
leaned down and laid his silent head on my chest.
Let’s say we’re writing this together. Let’s say I turn
to you now with a question about the wife, how her feet
—slipperless—darkened, on the morning grass, how she
came back years later in a cab to search the house
and did not know her own name. The clock is moving
its hands across the face of heaven. Aunt Yetta stops
between one breath and another. I gather her clothes
into a bundle smelling of talcum and cigarette smoke,
and place it at the foot of her bed. I did that then,
I would do it now, I would do it again tomorrow
if heaven would only look. I would lower the shades
to let the room blossom in darkness, to let Yetta
sleep on long past noon and even into the darkness
of the next day and the next and the next
while a name hangs in the brilliant morning air.
He drew our future in the dirt
with a broken knife he kept
hidden in a green wine bottle
under the sycamore. A circle meant
a perfect year in the absolute.
A straight line signified, but what
he wouldn’t say, laughing when
I asked and repeating, “Better not
to know more than you need
to know.” Soon I’d be sixteen,
small for my age but not scared,
perhaps because he drew me toward
a large X he called our manhood.
“Right there,” he’d say, “you and I
will give no quarter and ask for none.”
That was the March I planted roses
beside the back fence, and it snowed
almost into summer, the year
I found African daisies and stole
them from a neighbor’s yard
to plant in mine. Later when the war
darkened the headlines, and I
collected beer bottles in the alley
to trade for turnip seeds and put
in rhubarb and prayed the cold
held off, I’d waken in the dark
to see him hunched by the radio
at all hours. In the morning
I’d find black flags inked across
the northern coast of Africa,
black for them, black for us,
until one day the map was gone,
and he took to late night walks
even in the heavy rains of autumn
while the windows smeared my face
before me, while the roof drummed
the steady rhythm of our blood
until I fell into a dreamless
winter sleep he never wakened from.
The light sifts down from the naked bulb
he’s quickened with a string. He speaks
to no one out of the well of his anger.
He says, “I hate this,” and he stops.
He means more than this one-man shop
on Grand River where he stores the driveshafts,
bearings, and U-joints swiped
from the Rockwell Arsenal. He means
the stalled traffic outside, the semis
barking and coughing, the gray floor
inside littered with crowded pallets
so filthy they seem furred. He means
the single desk and chair, the hat rack
holding no hats, he even means the phone
he’s become so good at, for he’s learned
to give nothing away that matters and still
sound serious, to say, “No, we never
allow that much time,” and, “Pretty good,
and you?” in a voice so deep even he
doesn’t know it. Wardie, everyone’s cousin,
still in his twenties, though the blue-black
double-breasted size forty-six he strains
against makes him look forty, the hard fat
of neck, upper chest, and shoulders draws
him down into the chair, and he swivels
abruptly toward those he can’t see. Go ahead,
reach out and stroke the dark stubble,
run a lone cautious finger down the channels
for the tears he spills only in sleep.
He won’t bite you. He’s Wardie, the lost
brother no one remembers, so give him
the love he can’t give himself. Feel him
shudder and draw back, not because he kept
his word and killed, not because your thought
became his act, but because it came to this.
My sister rises from our bed hours before dawn.
I smell her first cigarette and fall back asleep
until she sits on the foot of the bed to pull
on her boots. I shouldn’t look, but I do,
knowing she’s still naked from the waist up.
She sees me looking and smiles, musses my hair,
whispers something secret into my ear, something
I can’t tell anyone because it makes no sense.
Hours later I waken in an empty room
smelling of no yesterdays. The sunlight streams
across the foot of the bed, and for a moment
I actually think it’s Saturday, and I’m free.
Let me be frank about this: my older sister
is not smart. I answer all her mail for her,
and on Sundays I even make dinner because
the one cookbook confuses her, although
it claims to be the way to a man’s heart.
She wants to learn the way, she wants
a husband, she tells me, but at twenty-six she’s
beginning to wonder. She makes good money
doing piece work, assembling the cups that cap
the four ends of a cross of a universal joint.
I’ve seen her at work, her face cut with slashes
of grease while with tweezers she positions
the tiny rods faster than you or I could ever,
her eyes fixed behind goggles, her mind. God
knows where, roaming over all the errors
she thinks make her life. She doesn’t know why
her men aren’t good to her. I’ve rubbed
hand cream into the bruises on her shoulders,
I’ve seen what they’ve done, I’ve even cried
along with her. By now I believe I know
exactly what you’re thinking. Although I don’t
get home until after one, we sleep
in the same bed every night, unless she’s
not home. If you’re thinking there’s no way
we wouldn’t be driven to each other, no way
we could resist, no way someone as wronged
as my beautiful sister could have a choice
about something so basic, then you’re
the one who’s wrong. You haven’t heard a word.
In an overstuffed chair, Trotsky sits half asleep.
Sr. Ruiz paces the floor,
hands clasped behind his back like the old men
of my boyhood. He could be
one of the old men of my boyhood, his cigar
unlit and reduced to a damp stub,
his gray curls jutting out from his fine Mayan skull.
Before the lesson ends Sr. Ruiz will demand to know
Sr. Trotsky’s theory of battle,
he will ask if the writings of Clausewitz
played a role in the triumph
of the forces of light over darkness, in the use
of cavalry in the last stages
of a war like no other, the first great new war.
Quietly Trotsky will sigh. He too could be one
of the old men of my boyhood
with a glass of yellow tea cooling on the arm
of his chair, with his glasses
sliding down his hooked nose, his reddened eyes
closed against the intrusion
of questions no longer worth answering, no
longer of interest to a man who wants to know
the words for a wool suit,
the proper method of ordering a five-course meal
that will not corrupt
his stomach or inflame a liver already damaged.
Let me make Sr. Trotsky
one of the serious old men of my boyhood,
let me change his name to Josef Prisckulnick
who crossed from Scotland in ’05
on the good ship Arcadia and spent two months
on Ellis Island because a passenger
came down with smallpox two days out of Glasgow
and died, unmourned, in transit.
Thus will I change the history of the world.
It is so easy to change the history of the world;
all you have to do is make Leon Trotsky
my dear grandfather in the city of Detroit, a vendor
instead of a victim. Let him
remain Jewish, let him wear glasses, let him drink
cold tea through his false teeth,
let the dead rise, let Sr. Ruiz question the wind.
Had she looked out the window she would have seen a quiet street,
each house with a single maple or elm browning in the sun
at the end of summer, the black Fords and Plymouths gleaming
in their fresh wax, the neighbor children returning home
dark suited or white frocked from their Christian studies.
Had she looked out she would have seen the world she crossed
the world to find. Instead she unclasps the leather purse
to make sure she has everything: mirror, lipstick, billfold,
her cards of identity, her checkbook with the week’s balance
correctly entered, two monogramed, embroidered handkerchiefs
to blot and hold the tears, for—dark veiled—she’s on her way
to meet her husband, gone three years now into the sour earth
of Michigan. Can the long white root a man in time becomes
talk back to one who chose to stay on the far shore
of his departure? Before the day ends, she’ll find out.
She will hunch over tea leaves, she will open her palms,
first the hardened hand of the wage earner, then the soft one
that opens to the heart. To see, she will close her eyes;
to hear, she will stop her ears, and the words will be
wrong or no words at all, teeth striking teeth, the tongue
doubled back upon itself, the blackened lips vanished
into the hole of the throat. But for now she looks up.
It is summer, 1936. The first hints of autumn
mist on a row of curtained windows that look in on us
as my mother, perfumed, leans down to brush my mouth with hers,
once, to say my name, precisely, in English. Later
two women will pretend they have reached two other worlds,
the one behind and the one ahead. As they keen
in the darkness perhaps only one will pretend, perhaps
neither, for who shall question that we most clearly see
where no eye is? Wide-eyed he sees nothing. White shirt
worn open, dark trousers with no belt, the olive skin appalled.
When the same wind he loved and sang to touches his cheek
he tries to rub it away. There are others, too, walking over
the flat, gray stones to where a line of men smokes and waits.
The trees have stilled. Had she looked out the window
my mother would have seen each house with its elm or maple
burning, the children drowning in the end of summer, the mist
blurring the eyes of our front windows, the shale hills
above Granada where all time stopped. Her purse snaps shut.
I remember the room in which he held
a kitchen match and with his thumbnail
commanded it to flame: a brown sofa,
two easy chairs, one covered with flowers,
a black piano no one ever played half
covered by a long-fringed ornamental scarf
Ray Estrada brought back from Mexico
in 1931. How new the world is, you say.
In that room someone is speaking about money,
asking why it matters, and my father exhales
the blue smoke, and says a million dollars
even in large bills would be impossible.
He’s telling me because, I see now, I’m
the one who asked, for I dream of money,
always coins and bills that run through my hands,
money I find in the corners of unknown rooms
or in metal boxes I dig up in the backyard
flower beds of houses I’ve never seen.
My father rises now and goes to the closet.
It’s as though someone were directing a play
and my father’s part called for him to stand
so that the audience, which must be you,
could see him in white shirt, dark trousers,
held up by suspenders, a sign of the times,
and conclude he is taller than his son
will ever be, and as he dips into his jacket,
you’ll know his role calls for him to exit
by the front door, leaving something
unfinished, the closet light still on,
the cigarette still burning dangerously,
a Yiddish paper folded to the right place
so that a photograph of Hindenburg
in full military regalia swims up
to you out of all the details we lived.
I remember the way the match flared
blue and yellow in the deepening light
of a cool afternoon in early September,
and the sound, part iron, part animal,
part music, as the air rushed toward it
out of my mouth, and his intake of breath
through the Lucky Strike, and the smoke
hanging on after the door closed and the play
ran out of acts and actors, and the audience—
which must be you—grew tired of these lives
that finally come to nothing or no more
than the furniture and the cotton drapes
left open so the darkening sky can seem
to have the last word, with half a moon
and a showering of fake stars to say what
the stars always say about the ordinary.
Oh, you’re still here, 60 years later,
you wonder what became of us, why
someone put it in a book, and left
the book open to a page no one reads.
Everything tells you he never came back,
though he did before he didn’t, everything
suggests it was the year Hitler came
to power, the year my grandmother learned
to read English novels and fell in love
with David Copperfield and Oliver Twist
which she read to me seated on a stool
beside my bed until I fell asleep.
Everything tells you this is a preface
to something important, the Second World War,
the news that leaked back from Poland
that the villages were gone. The truth is—
if there is a truth—I remember the room,
I remember the flame, the blue smoke,
how bright and slippery were the secret coins,
how David Copperfield doubted his own name,
how sweet the stars seemed, peeping and blinking,
how close the moon, how utterly silent the piano.