Mame-Loshn with a Mother-to-Be, and: March 30: An Elegy in Ultrasound

Mame-Loshn with a Mother-to-Be

On Tuesdays, I'd bike to my teacher's home—A lush split-level in a lemon grove.By ashes in the fieldstone fireplace, we'dTurn pages in a crumbling Yiddish tome.

She'd read a paragraph out loud. I'd askHer all the words I hadn't found and writeThem in the margins of my Xeroxed page,Then, stuttering, recite the passage back.

Word by word, idiomatic phraseBy phrase, each sentence grew into the next,As month by month, we gave voice to the talesOf daughters struggling free of fathers' laws.

Exhausted by my heritage, I'd yawnThrough foreign syntax. She laughed at the jokes,Resting her swollen feet up on the hearth.Outside, from deep shade, poppies reached for sun.

The pages—butterflies' wet wings—unfurled,Bright as the sky. She peered into the wordsHer mother read her long ago. I heardTheir language crying out. Her baby curled

Within the world her belly had become.Breathing her scent of milk and the fecund heatA pregnant woman emanates, I learned,Laboring to acquire the mother tongue.

March 30: An Elegy in Ultrasound

For Malka Heifetz Tussman

My Kaddish

On Malka's yortsayt (she died today, last year),Shall I stand, dimly placed behind a screen,To recite alone, while men below intoneThat prayer of praise that honors memory?

If they should hear my voice pierce through the screen,One polite young man would climb the stepsAnd offer to say Kaddish in my place:"A woman does not need to say this prayer."

How can I mouth this prayer behind a screen,As if I were ashamed? Malka refusedTo step behind the screen. She leaned toward light."Tayere, you are ugly when you are ashamed,"She said. "Remember, poetry is prayer."

The Screen

Gel is smeared across my swollen belly.The room goes dark. Then, suddenly, the screenLights up with echoes, and a pattern shows,Wavering through the bladder. There I am.

My organs displayed in ghostly stripes of grayAnd black are hard to read. Their rounded formsNudge one against another, crossed by lines.At the bottom of one shape, a circle is

Small, small, and blacker than black, a perfect null,A dot, a period, pintele yid—birth sac.

At five weeks old, or six, it has no pulseThat echoes can detect. Is now too soon

To discern its tiny throb? Is it alive?A future "you," whom I might tell, "I knewYou when you were a circle on a screen,Blacker than absence?"

*

            Gone, no graphic shape,An echo of her voice becomes my light.