Café in Maplewood, and: The Sleep of the Dead
Rent from DeepDyve- Café in Maplewood, and: The Sleep of the Dead
Café in Maplewood
He sits tall in his highchair, arms abovehis head, kicking his feet, smiling at usas we pass him. A waiter stops clearinga nearby, abandoned table of itsdishes and cups to wave hello, callinghim away from the spoonful of food hismother proffers and the napkin in hisfather's hand meant to wipe his mouth—and whenhe laughs we all laugh with him, as if theday has turned out to be a grand successalthough it is just past noon. And I guessit has, the room filled with people at lunch.
We hover about our young. We welcomethem into their world, as wonderful orterrible as it can be. Even thosewho outlived the camps (on their arms those blue,simple numbers) would smile at me as theyturned away from their conversation, aboy seated in the warm kitchen of hisgrandmother, where above the stove on thewall a framed doily read, "If contentmentis the theme, life's melody is sweet." Shehad set out from Russia, a girl alone.
She landed at Ellis Island and madeher way to Chicago and then returnedto New York with a sick husband and fourchildren, to the shtetl of Brownsvillein Brooklyn, to Herzl Street named for the greatZionist. So her dream and destinywas this neighborhood of people-filled streets,three shuls on her block and gangsters among [End Page 109] them from Murder, Inc. Now here I am ina café in Maplewood, New Jersey,full of hope, as I write this poem down.
The Sleep of the Dead
My mother would sleep "the sleep of the dead,"she used to say. We would wake her and shewould sigh, saying she had slept longer thanshe had meant to. On the day my fatherwas to leave our home he lay in bed withhis back to her, a single tear in hiseye—and she, breathing softly, lay with herback to him. "I wake to sleep," Roethke wrote.In her sleep she seemed to leave her dailytorments behind with her two sons, boyfriends,job, landlord, books, music, movies, paintingsand sculptures—as if sleep were without thought,without language or dream, the stepping outof time and into a still and deep lake.
In her old age she grew sick, too full ofpain to walk more than a few steps from herbed. One night, after a light meal with wine,she fell asleep. When we found her in themorning she was lying on her side, herarm crooked at the elbow and tucked underher pillow, her eyes and lips closed, her cheeksmooth. A thin thread of saliva and bloodhad trickled from the corner of her mouthand turned brittle on her chin. Her heart hadsurged and stopped. She looked like she had not knownit. Perhaps that night she dreamed—dreaming oflying in her mother's arms, of sinkinginto the calm water of her embrace. [End Page 110]
Burt Kimmelman is a professor of English at New Jersey Institute of Technology. He is the author of two book-length literary studies: The "Winter Mind": William Bronk and American Letters (1998) and The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages: The Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona (1996, paperback 1999). He is also the author of five collections of poetry, There Are Words (2007), Somehow (2005), The Pond at Cape May Point (2002), a collaboraton with the painter Fred Caruso, First Life (1999), and Musaics (1992), with a sixth collection, As If Free (2009) forthcoming. He recently edited The Facts on File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry (2005).
