Around noon

Glorious clear air and Mount Dessert crisp across the water
from Newbury Neck. Around noon the wind whips in
great cold gusts. We close windows,
batten down and wait -- but it passes without rain,
leaving the air even clearer. Night skies crystalline,
the constellations and the Milky Way luminous,
and this morning I see the ledges on Great Pond Moutain
plainly from our pond.

Another way

At the graveyard I kneel by the reddish granite
of Aaron's footstone. How we struggled
to decide what it should say. In the end
we chose the words of Elizabeth Bishop
describing the sea: "dark, salt, clear, cold and utterly
free…" The stone is dark and grimy now,
fixed over the grave, utterly immobile,
except for the movement of the earth in space.
Scrubbing with a pine cone
and water Jay fetches from an urn
I scour away the grime. We rinse it
and I dry it with a handkerchief
and as we take turns reading I watch the polished
surface reflect the leaves shifting over my head,
satisfied that ten years later
I have found another way to take care of Aaron.

Nour Bayyoumi

Nour Bayyoumi
is the name of a Palestinian girl who died
at the hands of the Israelis. That's all I know.
At the protest against the Israeli assault
on Gaza someone puts her name,
printed large, into my hands.
I hold it up. We are far from the desert of Gaza,
where bombs crush buildings and people.
Aging leftists and Palestinians in black, chanting
against Israel's attack, we stand safely in Times Square,
packed into two lanes as the traffic roars by.
Nour slips to the asphalt
and I bend down among the legs
to snatch her up before any one can step on her.

Does her family live to mourn her? Did they
all die together? Even so there must be
aunts and cousins who miss Nour, who miss
them all, as they live on in their shattered world.

Listen to her name again.
Nour Bayyoumi. Say it aloud.
You must help me.
She is ours now.
We must remember her.

Poems

The Veselka

I was waiting for my order with Arthur
and Curtis, my house painter cousin,
at our Nouvelle Ukrainian coffee shop,
when a young woman in tights and a jacket bumbled
conspicuously to the rest room, dragging a huge pocketbook
grabbed from another customer, it turned out.
The manager followed her. He took the bag.
She threw herself on the drafty floor.
She has a mental illness, Arthur said, his favorite diagnosis.
She’s drunk, I said, because of how she was throwing herself around.
Curtis noticed how her belly was exposed
under her light jacket as the manager tried to left her up.
She was good at flopping uncooperatively from his hold.
Call the police, Arthur said, to avoid a struggle.
The manager let her lie on the floor in the draft and phoned,
and Curtis left, then came back with a drop cloth to cover her.
A young cop followed him in.
Oh, it’s you, the cop greeted her. What’s going on?
I feel like killing myself, she said cheerfully.
I can send you to Bellevue.
I want to go to Beth Israel.
So that was what she wanted, a private hospital bed.
She wasn’t drunk, and I wasn’t sure she had a mental illness.
But she seemed to be able to take care of herself.
Bellevue, the cop said.
It’s a city hospital, they can’t turn people away.
So she went off with him, our spinach and cheese pirogi came,
and another customer stopped to ask the story.
I told him, She grabbed somebody’s pocketbook.
She wanted to go to Beth Israel.
Israel? he said, bewildered.

Reading Malcolm X in English Class

He was so smart, the Chinese girls said.
The best student in class.
They get upset when he’s into drugs and pimping in Harlem.
A gorgeous young Russian with glossy black curls objects:
We are not supposed to read this kind of book at college.
I say, finish the book. Then you can judge.
Pay attention to the turning points in his life.
Malcolm goes to jail and copies out the dictionary
and corresponds with Elijah Mohammed.
He sees that the white man is the devil.
The Chinese students accept this.
The Russians are upset again.
Even the police are scared to go to Harlem,
says one young Russian, a boy of seventeen.
I explain that’s the opposite of true:
It’s Harlem that terrorized, not the police.
Malcolm breaks with Elijah Mohammed and goes to Mecca.
He becomes world-famous for talking back.
Before he’s killed he sees the white man as part of a system.
Are you afraid? reporters ask, when his house is firebombed.
No, he said. I know I’m going to die a violent death.
The unlikeliest student, Ilia Milouchkine,
the mild, fair son of a preacher,
sitting in back in a wool overcoat, has a revelation.
I realize you must do what you want and not
what other people want. What
made Ilia understand that? I doubt
it was Malcolm’s understanding of racism. Was it
his lack of fear? His determination? How he stood up
without fail to answer back?

Seeking My Country

Last night I paced in a colonial mansion,
the wood floors echoing vacantly.
Of course, my parents were there,
though it wasn’t clear who was in power.
Then in another country I was in bed,
someone was holding out a map,
like a fancy flag or a decorated cake.
Probably it held the answers to all my questions.

But I woke to a messy kitchen and no coffee.
My husband went out for it.
My daughter called; she says she’s Nicaragua,
going forward despite obstacles. I’d go
for Haiti, I said, now that Duvalier’s gone.
Mom, I have my reasons, she said.

My parents are coming, I’ll have to make dinner,
though I’ll be inscrutable as the cake.

You would think you could tell your parents
who you are after forty years, two grown children,
and a fortune in psychotherapy. But they come to visit,
upholstered in their assumptions, drab raincoats
that last forever, and what do you do?
Serve the blandest food you can
and sit it out irritably. What if you said,
Look, I have sex at night.

Instead I dwindle on the couch, muttering dumb responses.
They get bigger and bigger.
My father resembles Captain Hook,
my mother a sad, Victorian Mrs. Grimsby.
I can’t wait to get back into bed,
and holding on to my husband’s warm ribs,
drop back into the dark underground.

Ex-marriage

My husband- I haven’t learned to call him
my former husband, but I correct myself-
has made more progress putting our marriage behind
him than I have. He calls the bed
where we slept and made love,
where I nursed our children,
where we squabbled and dreamed ourselves
from youth to middle age,
our ex-bed.

Sex and Wanting to Know

My mother is the lovely women at the party.
I lurch among them dazzled.
One leans down to greet me, offering
two moons of flesh. Mine,
I say, wanting to suckle.
She picks me up and laughs, her lips a gleaming ribbon,
like the one you pull to close a pouch,
her mouth full of moving pink and little teeth.
I can see she is bigger and more real than I am,
and I want to be her—beautiful long legs,
slippery with nylon, dangling earrings, and nimble hands.

To her my babiness—words and teeth just made—
was most wonderful of her selves.
Her own she barely glanced at in the mirror
when she put on the sexy dress and mouth.
Cheek to cheek with her newest granddaughter
she still talks of my infant charms,
for I was the first darling of my first love.

At thirteen I want her to explain how I came
from her rich depths. My mother is the sitting room
with nothing out of place where you can’t understand
the stillness. The carpet is thick, everything upholstered,
your footsteps silent. There’s no mirror.
You can’t see yourself.

The Present Absence

When his face became hostile his mouth
tightened against his teeth.
As whose wouldn’t if his parents tried to poison him,
had him spied on, then lied to him?
He didn’t even believe we were his parents—
that was a fiction we maintained,
for vague powers who paid us to trick him.
Are you willing to go for genetic testing? he asked.
Yes, I said. But he didn’t want that once he knew
I’d do it. It always triumphed,
that terrible perversity of his crazed mind.

If Aaron were alive now, I think,
alive and himself, as he was before he lost his mind,
he’d make planning his sister’s wedding easier.
He’d keep her from freaking out
every time there was a hitch.
He had that gift of lightness, of balance,
the confidence that things would work out
that comes with great ability.
He’d join the circle dances at the wedding,
tall and straight, with his broad shoulders.

It was like having a grand piano,
beautifully tuned, then finding it destroyed one day,
though it looked almost the same. Finding
that someone had installed a mechanism
that made it crank out the same mad tunes
over and again on its distorted scales.
Until it was gone. Then you’d concentrate
on how it had been when it was whole.

Crazy Baby

She calls me at my sister’s house in Washington to say
she found my wallet on the train she was cleaning.
“In a red pouch. It’s a wine color. Is it eel skin? The cash is gone,
but your credit cards, your license, your library card,
one for Red Apple, and the one for the bank machine all there.”
Is she trying to sell it back to me?
The credit cards I cancelled, but I don’t tell her.
“Yer family’s real good-lookin'.”
She’s even taking out the pictures; there’s no reserve possible.
I’m embarrassed to have her finger through my things.

Next morning, red daypack on my back, I ask Station Services for Track 8.
“Gate A. Why you want to go there?”
I explain and she nods her corn rows to give permission.
Under the high gray roof of the train shed I find
Tracks 8 and 9, 10 and 11, 12 and 13, but no Cassandra,
who I’m to know by her hard hat.
“Cassandra?” I ask someone with the yellow dome on her curlers.
No, but she leads me to Track 13.
I don’t mind that I’m going to miss my train. This is fun.
Five cars along the empty train two women say Cassandra is
back where I started. Walking there they ask for Crazy Baby.
Crazy Baby is right. I consider reducing the reward I promised.
“How’d she find you?” they ask.
She called my home in New York, I say.
“That was nice.” “Yes,” I say, restoring the amount she’ll get.

We’re almost at the gates when they yell, “Cassandra,
Crazy Baby,” at a tall, skinny kid, maybe twenty-two, hatless.
“I been lookin’ for you,” she says. “I’ve been looking for you,” I say.
“Walk with me,” she says.
She doesn’t want the whole station to see our transaction.
I don’t tell her, it’s too late, you should have been at Track 8
to start with, they’ll hit you up for sure.
She flourishes my wallet in its pouch; I pull three tens from my pocket.
Folded, it look like more.
“What train you takin'?” “The 9:20 but it’s 9:18 now.” “Come on” she says,
takes me a back way, asks, and asks again for number 86,
races two at a time down a steep double flight.
She had my license, she knows damn well I’m 43 and 5 foot 2,
I think, as she waves me on.
“Wait, wait, wait,” she yells at the conductor on the platform.
I can tell I’m going to make the train.
While I trot along, she shrieks, gleeful as an eighth grader
getting to boss the teacher, “Hurry up, hurry up.”

Women’s Action

The night before she died my grandmother hoped for a new world.
In it everyone would have what they needed,
and give what they could.
I would have liked to leave you that, she said.
This squabbling and gangsterism can’t go on.

We dispute who will get her pearls. I end up
with her father’s silver Seder goblet and her stories.
How she took money from the pushka
to buy her mother a beautiful belt of blue medallions.
How did you pay? her mother asked.
She had to give her daily penny into the box for months.

When she brought her father his noon meal one sweltering day
he was lying on a table to fan himself.
The girls were pulling irons from a fireplace,
dunking them in buckets that exhaled steam, to press the vests.
Don’t you see that workers are people like you? she asked.
She wanted him to cut his beard.
Later she was in love with the minister at St Mark’s in the Bowery.
It was like a sickness, she told me.
She took the streetcar from Avenue D
to hear him preach about socialism.
He too had a beard.
Where do you go on Sunday morning? her father used to ask.