IN LEMBERG

When she slept in Brooklyn, her rest scant and uneasy,
My grandmother Esther walked the streets of Lemberg. There,
In 1922, she met Joseph Conrad. Not the version who still
Walked in daylight but the one who'd taken
His uncle Tadeusz' advice to forget the sea
And go to the famed University of Lemberg.
He'd become a lawyer and married a Magyar flautist
Who died on a cold February afternoon
At 4:35; he'd written down the exact time
And always kept the note in his wallet.
As he aged he became unhappy at being unreal
He'd sleep for weeks then walk through dreams
Desperate for food and a bit of company.
Through two years -- he and his other both died
In 1924 -- she read him Yiddish translations of his works.
Their favorite was always Nostromo;
They wept together over the fate of Martin Decoud.

ALONG

That Tonto spoke Yiddish was no surprise;
From listening with her youngest to episodes
Of The Lone Ranger my grandmother knew
That Tonto could do almost anything.
After she died, he’d clattered up
To offer her a ride on Scout. They chatted;
Tonto, it turned out, was an orphan too.
He'd never seen Lemberg but had heard
That its streets were wide and that
The second oldest fish in the world
Lived in the waters of the Poltowa.

CATS

Lembergoise cats never hurried.
Gossiping idly in the sun
Exchanging barbed stories
About the folk who fed them.
(If I find a cat from Lemberg
He will remember things I forgot
Years before I was born)

Some sleepless Lvov cats always
Padded along the wide streets
While the others slept uneasily
(My father spoke the language of cats
With a heavy Lvov accent.)

In Lwow, the cats learned
To walk upright and to open jars
When war came, they vanished
Through tunnels they'd secretly built
(When I meet one of their descendants
We exchange complicated signs.)

A Lviv cat is simply a cat.
These days this is more than enough.

WHY I WASN'T ANSWERING MY PHONE YESTERDAY

Sometimes I am reassembled in haste
And, having gone to sleep a Polish Jew,
I awake a Jewish Pole, spending the day
Half in many-named Lemberg, around 1900
Reciting on the banks of the River Bug
The names of poets then unborn. I still
Know no Polish but it is a pleasure
Just to hear me pronounce Czeslaw Milosz,
Wislawa Szymborska, Tadeusz Rozewicz.

WHAT REMAINS

When the Ming lost the mandate of heaven
Some who had opposed them became
Furiously loyal, retreating in one way or another
From the victorious Tatars. Some became hermits
Or birdlike men who stepped lightly, leaving no footprints.
Of those who fled further one skipped through time
Like a rock across water, turning up first
In a small town in Essex in the 9th century
Where they assumed he'd fallen from the sky.
They called him "the green man." He married
And had six children whose descendants to this day
Have nothing good to say of the Tatars.
Next, he looped about and was born
In a shtetl ten miles from Lemberg. The Baal Shem
Offered to bargain for his release from his fealty
To the last Ming Emperor but the Lvoviner refused
Asking who if not he would say kaddish
For the vagrant soul of the Chongzhen Emperor
Or the soul of the beautiful Princess Kunyi?

MEETING THE EMPEROR

One day in her home town my grandmother Esther

Saw the ghost of the Emperor. This surprised her;

Franz Joseph was alive and even if he wasn’t,

Why would he be selling used clothes in Lemberg?

Still, she had no doubt. This was the face she’d seen

On stamps and coins, in schools and post offices.

She had always a soft spot for the Emperor;

And many decades later, in far-off Brooklyn,

Deemed herself still a reasonably loyal subject.

Her husband could, if he wanted – and he did –

Vote for Roosevelt but she, having grown up

With a monarch, considered a president

To be something inconsiderable. Franz Joseph

Did not roam about asking people to elect him.

Esther was 15 that day in the market with no intent

Of ever leaving Lemberg. Sometimes in her dreams

She flew, but when she looked down, saw the Poltowa,

Its bridges filled with statues which craned their necks

To see her flying by, waving at them.

(Her ninth child, my father,  also flew in his sleep

But I don’t know if he ever saw the Poltowa.)

Brave, she walked up to the Emperor

Who was extolling a pair of almost new pants

To a skeptical buyer, stretching the cloth

In his semitransparent hands. He gave her a smile

Behind his enormous mustache. How we have dwindled!

I cannot talk to dogs; I cannot fly in dreams

The closest I’ve been to an emperor is not very close

Though Dwight Eisenhower walked into my mother,

Knocking her down, three months before I was born.

A LEMBERGOISE

My grandmother Esther was from Lemberg
Also called Lvov, Lwow, Lviv and Leopolis.
When there was a kingdom called Ruthenia,
Its king lived there. Karaites drifted in

From Byzantium. It had  -- still has -- broad streets
Leading to an opera house, so my grandmother
When she was a teenager making cigarettes
With other factory girls may have gone
To see Carmen, which is also about a girl
Who makes cigarettes. Due to Lvov's shortage
Of Escamillos, or even Don Joses, she married Max,
A very nice man. Over time, mild affection for him

Blossomed into serene and settled dislike.
Had they stayed they likely would have died
Along with almost all the other of the towns’Jews.
She deemed New York no substitute for Lemberg.
The moon over the Hudson River was never

A match for the one whose white double

Swam through Poltowa’s broken willows.