GENERATIONS

Somewhere a shop of hanging meats,

shop of stink and blood, block and cleaver;

somewhere an immigrant, grandfather, stranger

with my last name. That man

untying his apron in 1910, scrubbing off

the pale fat, going home past brownstones

and churches, past vendors, streetcars, arias,

past the clatter of supper dishes, going home

to his new son, my father—

What is he to me, butcher with sausage fingers,

old Italian leaning over a child somewhere

in New York City, somewhere alive, what is he

that I go back to look for him, years after his death

and my father’s death, knowing only

a name, a few scraps my father fed me?

My father who shortened that name, who hacked off

three lovely syllables, who raised American children.

What is the past to me

that I have to go back, pronouncing that word

in the silence of a cemetery, what is this stone

coming apart in my hands like bread, name

I eat and expel? Somewhere the smell of figs

and brine, strung garlic, rosemary and olives;

somewhere that place. Somewhere a boat

rocking, crossing over, entering the harbor. I wait

on the dock, one face in a crowd of faces.

Families disembark and stream toward the city,

and though I walk among them for hours,

hungry, haunting the streets,

I can’t tell which of them is mine.

Somewhere a steak is wrapped in thick paper,

somewhere my grandmother is laid in the earth,

and my young father shines shoes on a corner,

turning his back to the Old World, forgetting.

I walk the night city, looking up at lit windows,

and there is no table set for me, nowhere

I can go to be filled. This is the city

of grandparents, immigrants, arrivals,

where I’ve come too late with my name,

an empty plate. This is the place.