- Elegy for Lillian
Sister Poem
My sister was a Unitarian,she loved life, the God-givengift of the world.She did not need Paradise to make her a Christian,thought all religions that promised Paradiseoffered a business relationship with a jealous God.She made a funny face at the mention of early martyrswho preferred to be fresh meat for lionsto living in the world, likely as slaves,rather than praying for show to the GodsTrajan or Emperor Augustus.Her Lord preferred His followers deny Himrather than sacrifice their lives,He wanted the living to live, love strangers,their neighbors, the Beatitudes.She certainly thought it wise to hide your Judaismfrom the public fires of the Inquisition;she damned the excommunicators of Spinoza,believed in doing what you could honorably doto stay out of cattle cars.
When I was a small childI thought my sister Lillywas mysteriously related to waterlilies,daylilies, lilies of the valley.
Imitating her handwriting, I made my first e and l.
I am ashamed, when I was seven, she was four years older,I wrestled her to the ground to show I was stronger,proof the state is stronger than language.Our dog took her side, barked “get off her.”It was a rare day I did not ask, “Lilly read me a story.”When I stood one foot three inches taller,she gave me her violin. When all I could play was “Long, Long Ago,”she taught me Mozart and Bach,that all things in the universe showed the hand of God.
Years passed. I thought prosody survives history.She read Rimbaud to me in French and English,and Lorca, whose photo I hung next to my bed.My sister wrote to me, “please speak at my funeral.”Not long after, I said, “To death there is no consolation. …”I read most of the lines I just wrote.I insisted the chapel doors and windows were opento a congregation of birds and insects. Lonersswooped in and out from noon to sunset.Not a drop of excrement on the mosaic floor.A hawk dropped a live mouse that prayed to liveon her coffin. She would have liked that.
Coda
My sister Lillian was a Unitarian.She insisted I not speak at her funeral.She made necklaces, pressed butterflies.Her husband invented our famous intercontinentalspace rockets, miniaturized atom bombsso they could be used as tactical weapons.Her closest friend, who married a Haitian, and Black Americanswere not allowed in his house. She did not protest,hold her breath, turn blue and faint,as she did as a child to get what she wanted.Lillian taught poetry, had four great grandchildren,she wanted our mother to have a Unitarian funeral.Our mother was not a Unitarian.My sister mailed me my mother’s ashesfirst class. Later, I collected my dad’s, buried bothside-by-side, Montauk daisies between—their unmarked rocks not too close.
For a wedding present two years after our wedding,my sister gave us a folded check, $25 to “buy a tree”and a rope ladder to keep on the top floorin case our house caught fire.I am grateful to the poet who taught mehow to get closer to something like the truth,that is my understanding,an unenumerated right, protectedby the 9th amendment to the Constitution.
Song of Barbed Wire
I’ve heard the red deer of Eastern Europeclimb with their fawns up rocky hillsto graze on poor patches of grassrather than go down to green valleysthat once were cut off by barbed wire,’round national borders and death camps.They respect, fear, rememberthe razor wire no longer there.
I graze on fables:thou-shalt-nots passed on by deer-talk,that has the sound of our long wet kisses—buck to doe to fawn, nose to nose. I hearcommandments sent by antlers scraping trees,received like the color of eyes.
Nazi and Stalinist barbed wire wordssend me up a hill to graze.I know my red deer-likeprogenitorspassed on to me...