this relic of summer, but he’s much too slow,
stumbling and falling in the ancient gulch,
as the dog lurches after him, trackless in the dust.
Borscht
Not the thin red broth that shares its name—
this was Ukrainian borscht, dense as a thicket
with cabbage, beets, and boiled beef.
A spoonful returned my father to the scraggly
outskirts of Kharkov, the bed by the oven,
picnics in the wood. His was a brief boyhood,
playing knight in the graveyard (razed
by the Red Army) that housed a Cossack poet.
Borscht, a heel of seedy black bread, a shot
of vodka, and he’d begin to sing folksongs
of rivers, birches, and long-dead heroes,
the songs he’d heard at his father’s table.
But when I whistled Edith Piaf, he spat,
French slut, to sing of love while men lay dying.
And we each ate silently from our bowls.
The Overcoat
The Russian professor has lost his overcoat.
Somebody snatched it—
somebody’s hands grasped his collar.
Without its wool, no room is warm enough.
Somebody tore from his back the weft
of eighty years, the tight stitching
of the Masters whose words he’s forgotten.
Alyosha? Or Andrei? Something with an A.
Now, despite the cold, he sweats.
Somebody left him in the empty square
in a t-shirt, track pants, and thinning socks.
His gesturing hands rub his forehead,
scrape vanilla ice cream from a dish.
Coward, traitor. Somebody takes and takes.
My Father in Vienna, 1958
He criss-crossed occupation zones,
pretending to be Czech, a story rehearsed
for train conductors and border check points.
The war hadn’t ended. He distributed leaflets.
Bolsheviks had burned his father to death.
The Americans with whom he worked jailed him
when Molotov visited the city, afraid
of what those refugees from the mustached
lunatic might do—but he studied, too,
came to the conclusion that God exists.
He spent his poor income on the best suits,
custom-made wool for his tall frame,
so the Viennese wouldn’t scorn him.
From their stone niches, apostles watched
as he traveled those bomb-blackened, black-
market streets with his forged papers,
a good man in a fallen city.
Their sandstone eyes blessed him through
the hands of spies, the informing landlady,
immigration officials and hiring committees.
They blessed him through loan officers, doctors,
deans; through the raising of two daughters;
through years of lectures, cancer, and nervous
breakdowns.
They blessed him all the way here,
Harlee Manor, where I sign the guest book
at the front office, hand my driver’s license
to the clerk on duty, and carry my box of chocolates
and papers to Room #101, my father’s.
Whose hands is he in now? Who will shave him
and help him to his walker? Who will button
his pajamas after he’s slipped in the first arm,
then the second, nodding his head in thanks?
Sorting Peaches
They tumble through the gate, fresh-picked,
still wearing the orchard on their skins.
Not one is perfect. Flame-colored,
amber-lobed, soft as a cat’s chin,
they rattle down the line, ringing.
Hands catch and sort them,
wrap them in tissue,
drop them into sacks or crates.
They’re attar of summer,
their hearts both stone and seed.
And what a gift to palm that globe,
that little world fashioned of sun,
flesh, honeyed veins, napped cheeks.
Each fruit a fulfillment, a weight
you welcome, sister, of earth,
cloud, heat, and sweet mystery.
for Claudia Krugovoy
On Our Anniversary
was shabby—its carpet faded Wedgwood blue,
no festive flowers in a vase, or ribboned pews.
But I loved the butter-yellow stucco walls,
and the little graveyard at the back, ivy-grown,
where only the tops of squat square stones shown
gray above the vines. Beneath the eaves, we held
for view our newly golden fingers.
We knew a great thing had been done.
We were to be each other’s rune and grail,
trunk and totem, handkerchief and spoon.
Forsaking sex with all others, refusing
escape alone from trouble, we promised to cling
to the human whom we’d named and kissed.
And what a wonder that we did, and have, that years
have proved us braver than we knew, and merry,
too, love still searching out each other’s hands,
as when, beneath the poplars’ summer green,
we walked from vows to wedding cake and dancing,
and cars drove in the street below the underpass,
distracted, to their many destinations.
for Andrew
Doing Laundry in Budapest
The dryer, uniform and squat as a biscuit tin,
came to life and turned on me its insect eye.
My t-shirts and underwear crackled and leapt.
I was a tourist there; I didn’t speak the language.
My shoulders covered themselves up in churches,
my tongue soothed its burn with slices of pickle.
More I don’t remember: only, weekends now
when I stand in the kitchen, sorting sweat pants
and pairing socks, I remember the afternoon
I did my laundry in Budapest, where the sidewalks
bloomed with embroidered linen, where money
wasn’t permitted to leave the country.
When I close my eyes, I recall that spinning,
then a woman, with nothing else to sell,
pressing wilted flowers in my hands.
There’s a River
There’s a river that’s not near us,
flowing through a city we’ll never see.
Thousands of cars drive back and forth
to and from the center each day,
planes land from faraway places.
Millions of people work in the shops,
factories, banks, the tall new buildings—
people who have never heard of us,
and never will; neither in the schools
will our names appear on the rolls.
The theaters will perform comedies,
the community band play on holidays,
and none of these will hear our applause.
To parties there, we’ll never be invited.
There’s an ocean that’s not near us,
too, just an hour from the town’s outskirts.
At night, its black waves absorb the stars
into its great depths, and the fish
for which we will never acquire a taste
swim placidly through the weeds.
Epiphany
Because all water is holy
this day, believers descend
into rivers hewn free
of two months’ ice.
Into the burning black
they plunge, flailing,
raising their arms
against the lashing cold.
And if they open
their eyes underneath—
before scrambling out—
what might they see
moving over the water’s
surface? The flashes
of cameras, like the wings
of so many doves?
Or their names,
vivid as silver,
rushing toward them
from the open sea?
No, it’s not
The body of Christ, the priest murmurs,
placing a morsel of bread in my palm.
Only I hear my son whisper, No, it’s not.
Eight-year-old skeptic, creed-smasher,
how to stop the erosion of what’s possible?
Or unhook faith from what can be seen?
One evening, strolling the Jersey bay,
we took flailing horseshoe crabs
by their spiny tails, tossing them into tides
so they could glide back to the deep sea.
And wasn’t that impulse, to save the ugly,
Love? My doubter, miracle-denier,
may God hurl your spikey edges into the waves.
May you be cradled in His body forever.
Sea Glass
Honey-brown fragments,
grass-green chips and shards,
the white lip of a lost jar.
These bits, left behind
by the tide’s wide nets,
shine, sea petals, between
oyster and mussel shells,
or the claws and hollowed-
out wells of horseshoe crabs.
They’ve tumbled up and down
the ladders of wave and stream
till their edges pock over,
opaque and velveteen.
Beer bottles smashed
and dropped into dark places,
lashed and sorted in deep
swells. No trails, no traces.
And why this amber scrap
and not another? My hands
sieve sand, then drop
the stranded pieces in my pail.
Something salvaged, sunlit,
gem-like. Something saved
from the grinding into grit.
IV
Late Renoir
To inhabit these bathing bodies—
pink, nude, with upturned breasts
and nipples like rosewater candy—
is to smudge away doubt, to blend
beneath willow-green and azure
the mutilation of war, his dead wife,
the black he banished from his palette.
Always the angles lushly rendered,
women’s thighs and bellies luminous,
edible, like tinted meringues.
Nannies, nymphs, whose hair
swept their shoulders like études
in the major key. And yet, beneath
the lace, the hook and eye of pain,
hands crippled with arthritis,
the cold snap of knowledge
like a garter pressing into flesh.
Extermination, the only motive
for preservation, for beauty.
Like a peach swimming in its jar
of sugared juices, hollow
where the pit was knifed away.
Valentine Godé-Darel (1873–1915)
Five paintings by Ferdinand Hodler
This beautiful head, this whole body, like a Byzantine empress on the mosaics of Ravenna—and this nose, this mouth—and the eyes, they too, those wonderful eyes—all these the worms will eat. And nothing will remain, absolutely nothing!
—HODLER, LETTER TO HANS MüHLESTEIN
1915: The Dead Valentine Godé-Darel
Someone has buckled black shoes on her feet.
The lines in the painting sweep horizontally,
for All things have a tendency towards the horizontal, to spread out
like water on the earth. Her body is a solitary animal
on its way to the dirt. Three blue stripes mark the wall
above the bed—are they sky, water, or empty of meaning?
The indifferent flatness of the mattress, her bed frame,
the wooden floor—her thin arms resting on her belly.
This is what’s left. The pure unanimated flesh of her.
Hodler kept painting, five oils the day after her death.
But why those shoes? The polished shine of the hides.
1915: The Dying Valentine Godé-Darel
The morning before she died, her worn head rests
against the white pillow. White sheets, mouse gray walls.
No roses, no clocks, no weeping willow. Her nose is larger now.
Her eyes and mouth are wide open, she is almost a corpse.
Life slips in and out of her slowing breath like a shadow. Her mouth is a heart-
shaped cave. Once her lover craved her body.
Over two hundred paintings, and still he documents the changes.
He observes her. His obsessive brush, does love move it?
Or does he paint despite their love? He stays by her bed.
Once, he knelt before her and leant his head against her belly.
The muscle in her throat stands out like a welt.
There is not a streak of red in the room.
1914: Valentine Godé-Darel in Bed, with Clock and Roses
Eyeing the wall, she has turned her gaze from the painter.
Though he’s two decades older, she’s the one dying.
Her black braid reaches her shoulder. A green stripe
crawls up her neck. Her fingers rest, long and unclenched.
Three red roses float vaseless at the foot of her bed.
And in the far right top corner, a tiny clock. Time consumes,
merciless as a mountain. Even mountains wear down
with age and they lie flat like water. But not yet, not yet.
There are the roses, and the clock, and the embroidery smocked
on her sleeve—three silver circles—such stubborn prettiness.
1914: The Sick Valentine Godé-Darel in Bed, with Folded Hands
The red of her hair has darkened. Her fingers are clasped, as if in prayer.
But she is not praying. Those eyes—
how fiercely they stare at her lover as he paints her.
She is propped up on her pillow, too weak to sit on her own.
He mixes sage and brown, filling in the angles at her cheekbones.
Grief, rage, pity—a pair of unreadable eyes—
wet against the vertical peach strokes of her face.
1913: Valentine Godé-Darel with Disheveled Hair
Her head’s upright and tilted slightly to one side.
The consciousness of beauty tumbles from her face
like her unbound auburn hair. That ballerina’s neck,
the slightly open, slightly smiling mouth. Another woman
could imagine the pleasure of kissing her. Or of feeding
her slices of cold apples, the flesh as white as her teeth.
Her eyes are so heavy with love that her lids droop.
Soon, she will bear a daughter. How fruitful her body.
An empress, a painter, a muse, a woman whose breasts are starting to ripen.
Portraits in the Country
Gustave Caillebotte, 1876
Four women sit at a park’s round tables
beside a bank of red geraniums,
each head silently bent to a task:
mending with fine needles, crocheting,
one reclined with a book on her lap.
No hurrying, no marking the moment’s news,
all of which will be lost in the vast
scrap bag of time.
Today, I, too,
take my handful of quietness,
cease striving after wind, goal, toil.
I am shutting my ears to the hours,
to the bell tower’s quarterly reminder
that I should be doing so
mething useful.
For death has come to our windows,
the preacher says, it has entered our palaces.
But I will not rush to push down my sash.
Instead, I will turn the leaf of my book.
See with what gentle gravity God
lets it hover, in balance, then fall to its side.
“Aren’t we all so brave?”
(P.S., who died of cancer in 2011)
It’s all right, a friend said, when I asked her
about dying. She could barely speak, the dead
had already visited her, she was thin with a swollen
belly, like a sparrow who’d swallowed a bell.
I think of three women with brain tumors,
comparing the sizes of their growths the way
one might examine a one-eyed kitten.
Hectors, each one of them, in their gaping gowns,
waiting for the helmets that clamp
their skulls in place for radiation—one bent
the same evening over her toddler’s bed.
Courage the last resource of the woman,
arms strapped overhead, pulled into the PET
after she couldn’t climb stairs without coughing.
Why didn’t she scream as the smiling doctor
showed her slides of her lung, collapsed like a ball
sieved by a dog’s gnawing incisors?
Why, instead, did she just nod, and even wish,
on her way out, the nurses a Merry Christmas?
Because those before us have scattered bravery
like pebbles through the horror, the funneling dark,
knowing we should not lose what makes us human.
Because the well-thumbed stones we eat in terror
turn to wafers in our mouths.
Saint Sunday
In certain folktales, she appears with Mary,
pierced through with the scissors and needles
of girls who worked, forbidden, on Sundays.
She is marred with knives, and scarred
with scythes wielded disobediently.
I imagine Christ’s gentle hands, healing
his battered Saint, pulling nails from her flesh,
gauzing over the wounded, bleeding breast.