LITMIR.BIZ

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      He will have a bonfire some night, without regret, or desire.

      Arizona

      On a small island

      in the green water of a harbor

      a ship sits upright on the sandy bottom

      barely visible in clouds of murk and hearsay

      under my eight- nine- ten-year old feet.

      Beautiful Hawai’i has on her endless summer.

      On a day like this things were blown to pieces.

      “Men died here”: but it doesn’t translate

      to my experience. The circle of island

      sits in a sky of perfect light. Only the sun

      breaks on these waves. The ship is berthed

      in its own past, its sky too remote to imagine.

      It’s the first place I remember, tall blue

      over adobe wall, the roadrunner highlighted

      like a flash of lightning. The light was like

      another world, white shouting, forever

      in my eye. Everything was gathered,

      every measure fled. Everywhere,

      to this day, the sky is Arizona.

      The Jewish Bride

      for Ruth Valerio

      She ran away with another man, he said.

      He took to gardening every weekend,

      his allotment a little island of sanity

      at the edge of Berlin. He rebuffed

      well-meaning friends, wanted to tend

      his cabbages undisturbed. Each week

      he took a basket and a different book

      to picnic in the Rosenkohl. After a few years

      there were only potatoes to till, but it was still

      his oasis from the terror of war or grief,

      a place to bring the solace of black market

      Lachs, French wine, the baker’s last loaf,

      fifty square meters he could call the future.

      Around him the world spun out of control.

      He used Mark notes to stuff the cracks in the shed,

      brought blankets and rags, mementoes, a rug.

      When the Allies came, he opened the door

      and led her, thin and pale and well read,

      in the circle of his arms in the sunlight.

      Every night was Passover, she said.

      Big Clouds Far Away

      the wind blew hard all night

      I tossed, threw off blankets, didn’t dream

      woke to the sound of thunder, worried

      had I left something out

      at dawn there was a shorn sky, white

      hazed, and big clouds far away

      I mowed the lawn slowly, thinking

      of tornadoes, disease, love

      all the things that could roar over unannounced

      anything that could sweep me away

      Salzburg, Republic of Austria, July 2006

      In order not to repeat history, it is not enough to know it,we must know ourselves, and our complicity.

      —Schilling

      Some days you have to take what you can get

      and that day my mother was too sick

      to find yet one more crowded pavement café

      and the worst of it was, sitting there in

      my habit, I had to see it all unfold: the tired

      couple with their small child, the empty table

      and the promise of refreshment, and then

      the waiter descending in a blaze of jeers,

      scathing looks and torrid gestures, and watch

      the husband and wife gather their dignity

      and leave, unwelcome only for the offense

      of resembling too much the enemy du jour

      and I had nowhere to go to, nowhere to

      hide my shame, no means of protest when

      the waiter returned and served us sweetly,

      set the coffee before me, and the only way

      I could ask is a veil any better than a chador?

      was to say, simply, Dankeschön

      Belonging

      Name a place: even the sounds

      tell the tale. And gravity, distance, distort.

      The stars over Germany in winter swung the whole sky

      northward, past the clay tiles around my rooftop window

      I could lean out and watch a cold dawn blot them into day

      Hawai’i was nothing but sun or rain or vowels, all

      a matter of light, cloud, dirt, wind, blue and green

      We learned about places impossibly far away

      Stars, when they came, spilled wider than the ocean

      Somewhere they shone over other places

      over you, over the Dutch flag that I was convinced

      was that of every nation, even over the dark wake

      of the midnight ferry from Oostende

      the crooked finger of the Chesapeake

      that surprised me from the plane. Home must be

      where I tend to, the tongue I am understood. Its weight

      changes the shape of everything, each tale telling

      every sound, every place in one name.

      process of conversion

      1 impasse

      they wanted me to conduct Second Waltz

      for a high school orchestra class

      and I thought one part went in 3/4

      and one in 2/2

      and the sign for the time

      was the symbol for infinity

      everything disorganized

      and last minute and late

      looking for parts, stands and chairs

      I don’t recall even beginning

      2 epiphany

      on a ship on an icy sea being “chased” by an ice floe

      and you didn’t know if it ended as a shipwreck or not

      and I was thinking “I am so tired of shipwrecks!”

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