At My Grandparents' Grave, and: At Auschwitz-Berkanau, and: Garden, Sabbath

At My Grandparents' Grave

We did not arrive like the old sagesfor advice or to get inspirationto make the journey to the promised

land. They are not floating above us,his beard and black coat and longwhite tallis swirling like a magic scarf

through the blue air, she beautifulas Bella Chagall with her purple dressand outstretched arms and thin body

shaped like a swan's. He is notcarrying her off above the townand his face is not turned impossibly

around so he can stare into her eyes,his lips on her lips. We did not arriveto be blessed by the original ancestors

or as inheritors of their great traditionor to remind ourselves that our livesshould be lived in holiness.

We came—my mother and I—in the mud of mid-March, rain sprayingout of a gray sky, to mumble what

we remembered of the mourner's prayerand to place a small stone on their stone.And to remember them in this life—

how he came home in his fedora hatexhausted from pedaling scrap, howshe kibitzed in the kitchen, sewing

buttons on a dress—how we traveledto this specific ground, wherewe can visit them here instead

of there, burned or flaked, ashesthe wind scatters, part of the air,the dark, the unsettled dust.

At Auschwitz-Berkanau

It is impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz.

—Theodor Adorno

No poetry in the railroad trackthat starts at the welcome centerand ends at the crematorium,

in the barbed wire sectioning offthe tall grasses of the flowering mustardand clover and violets—nothing

planted, everything wild, nothing touched,everything as it was, chimneyswithout their barracks, red-brick stacks

rising out of the earth as if to filter smokefrom a fire raging underground,the mid-summer, mid-afternoon sun blazing

as if it could torch this all away. Nopoetry in the one barrack still intact,still displaying the date of its construction:

1942, the pine two-by-fours nailedat right angles, the rows of holes duginto the floor for toilets, the dark odors

and dust swirls, the laser beams of lightshafting through the narrow slats,the claustrophobic triple-deck beds—

eight to a bunk—the dirt floors, the ratscarrying the diseases, the Polish wordsscrawled on the cracked concrete wall:

Keep clean. No talking. No poetryin the central yard across which husbandsand wives would search through

barbed wire for each other's eyes.None. Or in the monument to the victims,boulders falling into each other, plaques

in fifty languages bearing the same messageabout how this place is a cry of despairand a warning. No poetry

in the fifty-five years that passedsince they were kicked out of cattle carsand hauled past where I stand now,

close enough to brush my shoulders,marching through the airmy body now inhabits, filing one

after another and stepping downinto the large stomach of the crematoriumthat was exploded by its creators

but you can still see the space insidewhere they last breathed—no poetryin the black swamp the chips

of their bones and ashes of their fleshended up in, where I stand now, startledby the glassy eyes of the green frog

that gazes up at me from the bank,its crouched body stock-still likethe one my daughter pointed my attention

toward near the pond at home.We'd pause for the screech and leap.This one screeches.

It leaps.No—it splashes among the blessed shards—poetry.

Garden, Sabbath

We open ourselves upto the only moment there is—garden, Sabbath—the extra

stillness of late September,afterlight of harvest moon,the earth hanging on like

the last blast of the shofar'sbellowing breath, griefreleased, hearts broken

open into silence, hallowed,wounded by the year. Doesn'teveryone want to be a bird

again? A heart, beforeit dies, balancedwith...