Back in 1901

Outdoors, cows and a Vermont barn. Inside
our eighteenth-century summer farmhouse,
I quit sanding and oiling wide pine floorboards

and show up back in 1901 in Boston, determined
to know my dad's father, whom I never saw.
On Milk Street, a ghetto named after a London

Milk Street ghetto, I find the building, a slum
tenement where the choleric tailor lives
with a black woman, his common law wife.

The building stinks pleasantly of fried-liver
and fish aromas sitting like tired old men
on the stairs I climb now like a regular.

Morris Bornstein heard of me from son Robert
but we were a century apart, he in New England,
I off upper Broadway. I knock. It's good

to knock on the unknown, on a nonentity
who may be the hero of a story of the dog
who dreamt of heaven in a butcher shop,

which no one yet cares to write about.
Grandfather opens. "Hello," I say. "I'm Billy."
"No," he answers. I notice the immigrant English,

a wet shtetl lilt mixed with the Boston r
that goes unheard. "No," he insists. "If you
are gray and Robert's boy, then I am dead.

You can't be Billy!" "I apologize, you're right.
You are dead and I am dreaming you."
At once I feel like a dog. This is my ancestor,

ghettoized and despised by Poles, who steamered
over the sea from Warsaw to a Boston life
I couldn't guess. I am ashamed. "I was kidding,

Zeda. I'm not even born, but I wanted to tell
you I love you." "You love me? You're a
numbskull!" And he kisses me. I think we're

doing fine, yet know I can't get out of these
false tenses and the small shop where his irons,
heating up on a wood stove, are owls looking

at me with contempt. I apologize again.
"Sorry, I've come so late to talk. I never wished
to be cruel, but you were gone when I was

a child. They never told me. So I fashioned
your lips, your crooked back, your wife
who isn't home yet. I mean, the maid."

"I don't get you, Billy." He lets go of my hand.
"Stay with me a while. I'm pretty happy."
I sit with him all night. In the morning

Grandpa gives me a jacket he made, and presses it
with special care. When did he do it? We were
awake together. I take it. I'm descending stairs

smelling of Morris's shop, his owl irons, his glare.
Tonight I'm wearing the meticulously stitched
jacket, though it is tight and I'm a crummy actor.