Elegaic Voices

Elegaic Voices

Hand-Me-Downs

I wore hand-me-downs, I heard a woman say.
I wonder, what was handed down to me?
I hold a hand up. Knobby fingers throb
with the arthritic song my blood inherited.

From whom? My mother, in my only photo,
has the same long fingers I do.
Maybe she would soon have had this pain,
if she had lived. She died at twenty-eight.

My aunt, her sister, worked her fingers to the bone,
a factory seamstress at fourteen, at forty-seven,
back to school, to study art. She sends me
her dark etchings, dried flowers on cards.

My father's healthy (I believe). His father,
starving in a German camp, clawed through garbage
for potato peelings. Book lover, cavalry captain, Jew
killed by those he'd once been loyal to.

My sister has the same arthritic pain,
but she can dance. Her hands a tender arc,
she cradles air. Her feet carry her,
as mine do, even through this stumbling elegy.

"The Rain Lashes with Anger As Though It Wished to Flush Everything Out of the World"

(the last words, in Yiddish, in the diary of Yitshok Rudashevski, a fourteen-year-old boy living in the ghetto in Vilna, Lithuania, April 1943)

There are times the mind flows like rainwater
seeping through cracks under windowsills,
pouring down inside walls,
crumbling plaster, pooling, rotting floors,
water molecules grouping and regrouping
as thoughts do, guerillas sneaking up paths
of least resistance, armies dissolving almost
everything except some impenetrable essence—

sugar crystals, say, or rocks
separated from cliff faces by rain's pressure,
as anger, felt or dealt out, remains
the same collection of letters, as flush
connects embarrassed red with disposal of excrement—

there are times the mind rains down words
to address (or undress) horrors not readily expressed,
like water we cannot see
filling these body bags slung on bones,
these thinking, moving miracles
that can, nevertheless, be pulled apart easily,
crushed, drained, ground, burned, buried,

yet leaving a residue, a book, or a boy's sentence,
a pause in the world's thoughts, until the next time,
until a boy or girl in a ghetto tries again,
against a rain of lashes, to write.

Child with Suitcase

In a field of long grass, flowers,
a girl in a striped dress, frowning.
Her white ribbon. At the gate,
among weeds, a black suitcase.

Dear God! What am I saying?
That I still breathe this breath?

God's breath. A froth of flowers
in the girl's hand. White, lacy.
Hems of angels. Call them that.
Why not? How serious she is,

as if she might tell of steam rising
from the wheels of trains in stations,
or the forced embrace between air
and air that's not air but black
phlegm, a choking unto death.

Those flowers. I couldn't lose myself
even then. How far I've come,
still carrying my black suitcase,
to breathe the air of that field again.