More Wood on Our Diasporas, and: We Are all Orphans From the Same House, and: On the Plane to America, Gittel Muses on the Mutilated World

More Wood on Our Diasporas

Dearest Joseph,
On the airplane to America, I visit our Diasporas.

We might have gone to Babylon,
where, joyfully, we'd wept
that we were outcast together.

We might have gone to Mexico,
where Jews called New Christians went with Cortes,
and were burned at the stake by the Inquisition,
yelled like Tomas de Sobremonte,
"Throw on more wood. After all, I'm paying for it."

Or Arizona, America, where the marranos' descendants
light candles on Shabboth, not knowing why.

Mama wrote that you are engaged.
We pay for this life, wherever we go.

Now I go where purses are full.
In America, they drive cars, not carts, have more
than one best dress. The roads are not dust,
the yards not amok with children and chickens.
People eat inside the house, and no ground holes
or pits with blowing curtains for toilets.

Dayenu, Dearest Joseph:
If we had not been born in Poland, it would have been enough.
If our parents' parents had emigrated before the Holocaust,
it would have been enough.
If the Voice had not spoken to me . . .

Someone wrote about days with high foreheads.
To which I add, blind fists.

We Are all Orphans From the Same House

Dear Joseph, Remember the Lublin Circus?
The painted clowns, the gilded acrobats?
Only the tigers were caged,
because they were unmasked.

On the plane, I read these lines:
"You're starting to make peace with your times . . .
Why not? So why then does the circus tent rise
above an ancient graveyard?"

Can we begin again without remembering
the tree we lay under?
The wind blew the leaves about us like a curtain.

The air is nothing like the ocean's skin.
Water reflects all or buries it.
There are no highways through the ether,
but white strings bind us all, bind everything.
Up here, sounds are the ruffle of nothing.
Earth still turns below, though you don't hear
the battles' clatter, the legions marching.

Who says the soul does not exist?
Its old tired voice rattles suddenly.
My letters to you
like prophecies from Delphi's cloistered oracle,
from some heroine in the desert.

On the Plane to America, Gittel Muses on the Mutilated World

On the plane I wear the wig Tante gave me to disguise myself.

Wherever I go, my parents come
and theirs, whom Polish Anka hid.

For ten pounds sugar, she could have turned them in
to burn alive in the village school.

You burn for an hour before your gall bladder bursts.

The Polish poet says, "Pity the mutilated world."

I send a paper prayer to Jerusalem,
to be set between stones in the Wailing Wall:
     What are the duties of the soul?
     How do we mediate the world's indifference?

Arabs took the Jewish Cemetery's stones
for paving blocks; Jews took Arab rock to build the Knesset.
Who decides what is just? What acts of history
we must repent, forgive, if all need forgiveness?
In my dreams I see a ladder to the sky,
rungs worn by feet climbing, slipping back.

My words are like comic strip bubbles:
     Wonder Woman boasts how strong she is.
My body moves on.
A surgeon might whisper, "Look, her heart is broken."
A mystery, the heart, the jig.

Before I left Italy, Mama wrote,
"Joseph is engaged.
After all, it's three years."

In Mexico, they held up signs: We are waiting for you,
hailing Trotsky, before they took an ax to his head.