they feel like eternal forms:the house and barn
on the rise above May Pond; the brow of Pisgah;
the face of milkweed blooming,
brookwater pleating over slanted granite,
boletus under pine, the half-composted needles
it broke through patterned on its skin.
Shape of queen anne’s lace, with the drop of blood.
Bladder-campion veined with purple.
Multifoliate heal-all.
II
I refuse to become a seeker for cures.
Everything that has ever
helped me has come through what already
lay stored in me.Old things, diffuse, unnamed, lie strong
across my heart.
This is from where
my strength comes, even when I miss my strength
even when it turns on me
like a violent master.
III
From where?the voice asks coldly.
This is the voice in cold morning air
that pierces dreams.From where does your strength come?
Old things …
From where does your strength come, you Southern Jew?
split at the root, raised in a castle of air?
Yes.I expected this.I have known for years
the question was coming.From where
(not from these, surely,
Protestant separatists, Jew-baiters, nightriders
who fired in Irasburg in nineteen-sixty-eight
on a black family newly settled in these hills)
From where
the dew grows thick late August on the fierce green grass
and on the wooden sill and on the stone
the mountains stand in an extraordinary
point of no returnthough still are green
collapsed shed-boards gleam like pewter in the dew
the realms of touch-me-notfiery with tiny tongues
cover the wild ground of the woods
IV
With whom do you believe your lot is cast?
From where does your strength come?
I think somehow, somewhere
every poem of mine must repeat those questions
which are not the same.There is a whom, a where
that is not chosenthat is givenand sometimes falsely given
in the beginning we grasp whatever we can
to survive
V
All during World War II
I told myself I had some special destiny:
there had to be a reason
I was not living in a bombed-out house
or cellarhiding out with rats
there had to be a reason
I was growing up safe, American
with sugar rationed in a Mason jar
split at the rootwhite-skinned social Christian
neither gentile nor Jew
through the immense silence
of the Holocaust
I had no idea of what I had been spared
still less of the women and menmy kin
the Jews of Vicksburg or Birmingham
whose lives must have been strategies no less
than the vixen’s on Route 5
VI
If they had played the flute, or chess
I was toldI was not told what they told
their children when the Klan rode
how they might have seen themselves
a chosen people
of shopkeepers
clinging by strategy to a way of life
that had its own uses for them
proud of their length of sojourn in America
deploring the late-comersthe peasants from Russia
I saw my father building
his rootless ideology
his private castle in air
we were the chosen people
In the beginning we grasp whatever we can
VII
For years I struggled with you:your categories, your theories, your will, the cruelty which came inextricable from your love.For years all arguments I carried on in my head were with you.I saw myself, the eldest daughter raised as a son, taught to study but not to pray, taught to hold reading and writing sacred: the eldest daughter in a house with no son, she who must overthrow the father, take what he taught her and use it against him.All this in a castle of air, the floating world of the assimilated who know and deny they will always be aliens.
After your death I met you again as the face of patriarchy, could name at last precisely the principle you embodied, there was an ideology at last which let me dispose of you, identify the suffering you caused, hate you righteously as part of a system, the kingdom of the fathers.I saw the power and arrogance of the male as your true watermark; I did not see beneath it the suffering of the Jew, the alien stamp you bore, because you had deliberately arranged that it should be invisible to me.It is only now, under a powerful, womanly lens, that I can decipher your suffering and deny no part of my own.
VIII
Back there in Maryland the stars
showed liquescent, diffuse
in the breathless summer nights
the constellation melted
I thought I was leaving a place of enervation
heading north where the Drinking Gourd
stood cold and steady at last
pointing the way
I thought I was following a track of freedom
and for awhile it was
IX
Why has my imagination stayed
northeast with the ones who stayed
Are there spirits in me, diaspora-driven
that wanted to lodge somewhere
hooked into the “New” Englanders who hung on
here in this stringent space
believing their Biblical language
their harping on righteousness?
And, myself apart, what was this like for them,
this unlikely growing season
after each winter so mean, so mean
the trying-down of the spirit
and the endless rocks in the soil, the endless
purifications of self
there being no distance, no space around
to experiment with life?
X
These upland farms are the farms
of invaders, these villages
white with rectitude and death
are built on stolen ground
The persecuted, pale with anger
know how to persecute
those who feel destined, under god’s eye
need never ponder difference
and if they kill others for being who they are
or where they are
is this a law of history
or simply, what must change?
XI
If I try to conjure their lives
—who are not my people by any definition—
Yankee Puritans, Québec Catholics
mingled within sight of the Northern Lights
I am forced to conjure a passion
like the tropism in certain plants
bred of a natural region’s
repetitive events
beyond the numb of poverty
christian hypocrisy, isolation
—a passion so unexpected
there is no name for it
so quick, fierce, unconditional
short growing season is no explanation.
XII
And has any of this to do with how
Mohawk or Wampanoag knew it?.
is the passion I connect with in this air
trace of the original
existences that knew this place
is the region still trying to speak with them
is this light a language
the shudder of this aspen-grove a way
of sending messages
the white mind ba
rely intercepts
are signals also coming back
from the vast diaspora
of the people who kept their promises
as a way of life?
XIII
Coming back after sixteen years
I stare anew at things
that steeple pure and righteous
that clapboard farmhouse
seeing what I hadn’t seen before
through barnboards, crumbling plaster
decades of old wallpaper roses
clinging to certain studs
—into that dangerous place
the family home:
There are verbal brutalities
borne thereafter like any burn or scar
there are words pulled down from the walls
like dogwhips
the child backed silent against the wall
trying to keep her eyes dry;haughty;in panic
I will never let you know
I will never
let you know
XIV
And if my look becomes the bomb that rips
the family home apart
is this betrayal, that the walls
slice off, the staircase shows
torn-away above the street
that the closets where the clothes hung
hang naked, the room the old
grandmother had to sleep in
the toilet on the landing
the room with the books
where the father walks up and down
telling the child to work, work
harder than anyone has worked before?
—But I can’t stop seeing like this
more and more I see like this everywhere.
XV
It’s an oldfashioned, an outrageous thing
to believe one has a “destiny”
—a thought often peculiar to those
who possess privilege—
but there is something else:the faith
of those despised and endangered
that they are not merely the sum
of damages done to them:
have kept beyond violence the knowledge
arranged in patterns like kente-cloth
unexpected as in batik
recurrent as bitter herbs and unleavened bread
of being a connective link
in a long, continuous way
of ordering hunger, weather, death, desire
and the nearness of chaos.
XVI
The Jews I’ve felt rooted among
are those who were turned to smoke
Reading of the chimneys against the blear air
I think I have seen them myself
the fog of northern Europe licking its way
along the railroad tracks
to the place where all tracks end
You told me not to look there
to become
a citizen of the world
bound by no tribe or clan
yet dying you followed the Six Day War
with desperate attention
and this summer I lie awake at dawn
sweating the Middle East through my brain
wearing the star of David
on a thin chain at my breastbone
XVII
But there was also the other Jew. The one you most feared, the one from the shtetl, from Brooklyn, from the wrong part of history, the wrong accent, the wrong class. The one I left you for.The one both like and unlike you, who explained you to me for years, who could not explain himself.The one who said, as if he had memorized the formula, There’s nothing left now but the food and the humor.The one who, like you, ended isolate, who had tried to move in the floating world of the assimilated who know and deny they will always be aliens.Who drove to Vermont in a rented car at dawn and shot himself.For so many years I had thought you and he were in opposition. I needed your unlikeness then; now it’s your likeness that stares me in the face.There is something more than food, humor, a turn of phrase, a gesture of the hands:there is something more.
XVIII
There is something more than self-hatred. That still outlives
these photos of the old Ashkenazi life:
we are gifted children at camp in the country
or orphaned children in kindergarten
we are hurrying along the rare book dealers’ street
with the sunlight striking one side
we are walking the wards of the Jewish hospital
along diagonal squaresyoung serious nurses
we are part of a family group
formally taken in 1936
with tables, armchairs, ferns
(behind us, in our lives, the muddy street
and the ragged shames
the street-musician, the weavers lined for strike)
we are part of a family wearing white head-bandages
we were beaten in a pogrom
The place where all tracks end
is the place where history was meant to stop
but does not stopwhere thinking
was meant to stop but does not stop
where the pattern was meant to give way at last
but only
becomes a different pattern
terrible, threadbare
strainedfamiliaron-going
XIX
They say such things are stored
in the genetic code—
half-chances, unresolved
possibilities, the life
passed on because unlived—
a mystic biology?—
I think of the women who sailed to Palestine
years before I was born—
halutzot, pioneers
believing in a new life
socialists, anarchists, jeered
as excitable, sharp of tongue
too filled with life
wanting equality in the promised land
carrying the broken promises
of Zionism in their hearts
along with the broken promises
of communism, anarchism—
makers of miracle who expected miracles
as stubbornly as any housewife does
that the life she gives her life to
shall not be cheap
that the life she gives her life to
shall not turn on her
that the life she gives her life to
shall want an end to suffering
Zion by itself is not enough.
XX
The faithful drudging child
the child at the oak desk whose penmanship,
hard work, style will win her prizes
becomes the woman with a mission, not to win prizes
but to change the laws of history.
How she gets this mission
is not clear, how the boundaries of perfection
explode, leaving her cheekbone grey with smoke
a piece of her hair singed off, her shirt
spattered with earth … Say that she grew up in a house
with talk of books, ideal societies—
she is gripped by a blue, a foreign air,
a desert absolute:dragged by the roots of her own will
into another scene of choices.
XXI
YERUSHALAYIM:a vault of golden heat
hard-pulsing from bare stones
the desert’s hard-won, delicate green
the diaspora of the stars
thrilling like thousand-year-old locusts
audible yet unheard
a city on a hill
waking with first light to voices
piercing, original, intimate
as if my dreams mixed with the cries
of the oldest, earliest birds
and of all whose wrongs and rights
cry out for explication
as the night pales and one more day
breaks on this Zion of hope and fear
an
d broken promises
this promised land
XXII
I have resisted this for years, writing to you as if you could hear me.It’s been different with my father:he and I always had a kind of rhetoric going with each other, a battle between us, it didn’t matter if one of us was alive or dead.But, you, I’ve had a sense of protecting your existence, not using it merely as a theme for poetry or tragic musings; letting you dwell in the minds of those who have reason to miss you, in your way, or their way, not mine. The living, writers especially, are terrible projectionists.I hate the way they use the dead.
Yet I can’t finish this without speaking to you, not simply of you.You knew there was more left than food and humor.Even as you said that in 1953 I knew it was a formula you had found, to stand between you and pain.The deep crevices of black pumpernickel under the knife, the sweet butter and red onions we ate on those slices; the lox and cream cheese on fresh onion rolls; bowls of sour cream mixed with cut radishes, cucumber, scallions; green tomatoes and kosher dill pickles in half-translucent paper; these, you said, were the remnants of the culture, along with the fresh challah which turned stale so fast but looked so beautiful.