WHEREVER I LOOK, I AM NEVER THERE
IN TIME
Should a starfish
lose an arm
it grows another.
A shell gently
into the bottom of a hole in the sand
close to the surf.
The sand is wet
and filled with life,
filled back over with sand.
This morning I noticed you
across the boardwalk
briskly walking.
My father died
I saw him everywhere for months.
Now only once in a while.
Uncle Leo
I spotted just the other day at the market
fingering a can of tuna.
Last time I saw him alive
it was Malka’s funeral.
Uncle Leo looks like a chipmunk, you whispered.
We held our giggles—
a couple of school kids
watching the bigkids doing it
under the boardwalk
out on the parking lot
back of the market
Uncle Leo looks like a chipmunk.
It is just the cancer
changed him
stuffed his cheeks with acorns
Crushed gray hat.
Frayed sweater
unraveling
since the day
Aunt Sylvia died
the summer before.
Late afternoons
a doe would come softly into the meadow to feed.
Wary, we held our breath.
After the service
we name the doe Aunt Sylvia
and wait.
Aunt Sylvia does not come to the meadow
not that afternoon
not the next.
The doe never returns.
We broke camp and drove
to the sea.
The way you were walking
you were running
from everywhere
we had ever been together.
A shell placed gently
into the bottom of a hole in the sand
close to the surf,
filled back over with sand.
Arm and arm
we stroll the boards.
All the while you are somebody else
briskly walking
without me.
In time, the shell will grow into a clam again.
Time to cross the sand
RIVKAH
Many times, I have seen this bird, or others like it, by itself,
or in large numbers, standing on thin, yellow legs,
in the shallows at the edge of one of the salt marshes
I sometimes visit.
The marsh I am visiting now is at the southern tip
of a narrow peninsula off the coast of New Jersey. The sun
setting in the background, an enormous orange disc,
makes the bird difficult to see.
Not only now, but every time I see the bird, I say its name,
as though in saying the name I am saying something significant
about the bird, but the fact is that when I pronounce its name,
it is not about the bird I am talking
but about myself, that I am the sort of person who calls a bird
by its proper name; that through its name, this bird and I
are bound essentially together. This bird and I,
we come from one another
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
On the outskirts of town, along with the other women
and the elderly men and the children, my mother’s
grandmother, a tiny person with spindly legs, a woman
I have never met, a woman I know only from photographs,
was shot to death by some neighbors and fell into a shallow ditch
half-filled with muddy water. She was killed for being Jewish,
and for a couple of fingers of whiskey. Her name was Rivkah.
David, my mother’s cousin Neshi’s second husband,
told me the date. It was the same day that a few hours earlier
he and the other men were taken from their homes to a railway station
and beaten. Then a long train ride to slave labor
and casual torture he never spoke about,
and a room filled with poison gas he escaped to survive.
Forty-seven years after Rivkah collapsed in the late afternoon sun,
dead from her neighbors’ bullets, David told me.
He told me everything. David told me nothing.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Rivkah was the mother of his friend Leibel he had played with as a child;
my grandfather’s baby brother, Leibel. My mother’s uncle, Leibel,
she did not meet until he was an old man, leading a donkey
along a dusty road in a faraway place.
When the knock came on the door, Leibel went out the back window
into the forest. His wife had told him Go. Leibish,
go, they are coming for you.
He never saw his wife or children again.
Leibel, a name that means heart, a name that means dear heart.
My mother’s grandmother’s name is Rivkah—
in the language of this country, Rebecca. My great grandmother.
The original meaning of the name is not entirely clear.
It is sufficient to know the name.
It is crucial to know whose name it is
The year Rivkah was murdered
was the year of my first birthday.
David told me
forty-four years later.
He told me everything.
I was forty-five years old
when David told me.
David told me nothing.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Eighteen years later while sitting shiva for my mother,
her cousin Sonya shakes her head—To the day he died,
Sonya whispers, Leibish never forgave himself
for going out that window. They had thought
the Nazis were coming for the men. But they came
for the women. And for the children
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Rebecca went to the well to draw water to fill her pitcher.
When the water saw it was Rebecca, it rose on its own.
And Rebecca’s pitcher was filled, without effort.
Rebecca did not bend. Nor did she labor.
The bird scratches its toes in the mud, lunges,
stabs its head into the water, pulls back in a moment—
an eel wriggling in its bill.
Rivkah and the bird take no notice of one another, go off
in different directions. Much of the time, I keep my eyes on Rivkah.
My younger sister’s name is Rivkah.
She is named after our great-grandmother.
Much of the time my thoughts are with the eel wriggling.
Much of the time, I am alone in a marsh filled with ghosts.
RAIN IS ALWAYS ON THE WAY
Rain is always on the way. What she said
pain never goes away. Everything
he remembers from childhood, years
of reruns of home movies shadows
flicker like flames. This is a movie
of my father watching us play catch.
This one almost too dark
to make out the faces my father
watching us on the Fourth of July
wide-eyed fireworks exploding
in the sky over Lake Etra we
spent summers fishing and swimming.
Whenever it rains on television
he runs upstairs to close the windows.
He no longer recognizes the face
in the mirror he shaves in the morning.
He has forgotten the names of his children.
On the anniversary of September 11th
he shouts “Get out! Get out of the building!”
at an amateur video of the plane approaching.
He dreams his tongue is a flame
licking at the feet of office workers running to
thick windows looking for somewhere to leap.
He opens his eyes to extravagant smoke.
Once I lost one of the oars out
in the middle of the lake. I went over
the edge to bring it back. Don’t go,
my mother begged. I was gone
the boat rocking in the still water
behind me. There is no movie of me
swimming in deep water to bring
back the oar. Or my brother’s admiring face,
my baby sister asleep in mommy’s arms.
All there is that August afternoon—
sun ricocheting off the lake—my father
not there to watch us through his lens—
a poem my mother wrote the following week
she read to me this morning in the hospital
through vines of plastic tubing.
Rain is always on the way, she said.
Always wear your galoshes, she said.
Pain never goes away.