Against the Evidence: Selected Poems, 1934–1994

1905

I am alone in my apartment, alone as you were without me in your last days at about my age. I am listening to Rossiniand thinking of you affectionately, longing for your presence once more, of course to wrestle with your character, the game once again of independence, but now, now in good humor because we already know the outcome, for I am sixty-six,going on sixty-seven, and you are forever seventy-two. We are both old men and soon enough I'll join you. So why quarrel again, as if two old men could possibly settle between them what wasimpossible to settle in their early days? 1905 While my father walked through mud in shoes borrowed from his sister, all Kiev attended Prince Igor and cheered, and while he worked in a cellarbindery and slept on workbenches rats leapt over at night, Dostoevsky's White Nights and Anna Karenina were being read avidly amid joy, tears and protests. My father was the silent one, walking through the streets where the hot arguments went on about poverty and guilt. He walked, his work bundle under arm, from cellar to monastery, to bind holy books and volumes of the Russianclassics, and when they had had enough of classics and needed blood, he fled, for his blood was real to them; only he had worked and starved. All others were but characters in a novel or a play— bless Chekhov, Gogol and others for their genius, but my father was the one who had not been 726 | Poems of the 1980s immortalized and made untouchable. Only he was real in Russia'storment. Only he stood for life. All else was books, and that was the torment. Kaddish Mother of my birth, for how long were we together in your love and my adoration of your self? For the shadow of a moment, as I breathed your pain and you breathed my suffering. As we knew of shadows in lit rooms that would swallow the light. Your face beneath the oxygen tent was alive but your eyes closed, your breathing hoarse. Your sleep was with death. I was alone with you as when I was young but now only alone, not with you, to become alone forever, as I was learning watching you become alone. Earth now is your mother, as you were mine, my earth, my sustenance and my strength, and now without you I turn to your mother and seek from her that I may meet you again in rock and stone. Whisper to the stone, I love you. Whisper to the rock, I found you. Whisper to the earth, Mother, I have found her, and I am safe and always have been. The Ship I saw an ocean liner in the desert, its crew leaning over the railing, as though the ship were plowing through the waves of sand. I was reluctant to ask how a ship came to rest in the desert. The world itself was strange enough, and I did not want to ask questions that would make matters worse. I hailed the crew from my position on the sand 727 ...