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  • Now and Then: A Poem for Two Voices
  • Andrea L. Watson (bio)

Whose house did we visit that summer, Boardwalk planks thin as splinter trees? We’d walk salt ocean as three, you and Aunt Sara Heeling along on orthopedic shoes brown as brillo hair

they placed you in a simple casket, white-muslin linedlike a child’s memory box, your eyes sunken coalsjoined to a burning flame, undertaker-pink lipstickon your mouth unreal as a soul under fluorescent lights

Mornings we sat entwined, your freckled thigh compressed Against mine, in the great windowed room, companions floating On chartreuse boarding-house couches, you reading Forward To me in Yiddish, clucking and offering proverbs

then my mother stood next to your body, holdingyour hand in hers, fingers five white orchidsin a hothouse of the dead, her grasp a benedictionof soft promises she made and kept to never let go [End Page 44]

At dusk, we’d watch Benka the Waiter place silverplate Atop tables of white-whaled cloth while you scribbled Undecipherable Hebrew letters on a tablet you kept in the foyer, Ashamed you never learned the language of your new world

what can you say about a mother, he asked,your child, one of two left alive, and againthe rabbi asked him for anything at all—wordsto tell about you—the mystery of your life

Autumn, and you pretended your mark on that document, Sixteen letters staggering across a bottom line, unsure footprints Of a wandering desert prophet, signing away your world— Spelling out words in a tongue only your past could understand

safe in your coffin, I placed a parchment note,gossamer as remembrance, telling you I loved youand asking you to send me one sign in dreamsof silver shining from that desolation place

When we didn’t forget to visit, your spidery fingers Brailled my face and you whispered Remember me In the dusk of winter when you’re home alone one day After school take care to always learn your letters

for years I waited for some mystical omen you’d reveal,like Kabalists meditating on their mythologyof small mysteries—celestial palaces or rays of raw lightchanneled through vessels—to beckon me from beyond

You never answered. Although I imagined shefa shadows of your life Extending toward infinity, somehow my soul forgot You could not write the ancient letters of G-d’s name. [End Page 45]

Andrea L. Watson

Former Director of Admissions for The Denver Campus for Jewish Education, Andrea L. Watson’s poetry has appeared in RUNES, Comstock Review, Ekphrasis, Folio, Dublin Quarterly, and Earth’s Daughters, among others. Her show, Braided Lives: A Collaboration Between Artists and Poets, was inaugurated by the Taos Institute of Arts and has traveled to San Francisco, Denver, and Berkeley. She is co-editor of HeartLodge: Honoring the House of the Poet.

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