FAMILY MATTERS

It is 1890; my grandmother Esther is one year old
And Max, whom she will someday marry,
Is two -- twice her age; it is obvious
They’ll never suit each other. Her mother
Is alive or dead. She anxiously asks me
Which but I don't know; after consideration
I allow my great grandmother more time
To walk the broad streets of Lvov and to look
At the river about which her daughter will dream
When she’s thousands of miles away.
Irina, Esther's sister, is already born
Or perhaps not. There may be other children;
I'll lodge them in Paris until I discover
Whether they existed. If they did,
I'll bring them home. If they didn't, at least
They'll have had some very good meals
And the consolation of speaking French
With Parisian grace and assurance.

75 KILOMETERS

A long day's walk from Sambor to Lvov;
Dawn will see you on your way and stars
Of uncertain omen will watch you enter
Either through the tall gates the Tatars
Carried off in 1241 or climbing the wall
The Austrians took down in 1770.
The guards may ask for money; ignore them;
They work for a king whom scholars
Strongly suspect never existed

RIVER

My grandmother once, only once, mentioned to my father
That she used to dance by the river with other children.
He was astonished. A song was playing on the radio
The very music to which she'd danced when radios
Had not been invented. How little I know of her! She made
Noodles from scratch; she wanted three but had nine children
With a man she didn't much like. She learned English
By studying her children's schoolbooks. Her dreams
Mostly took place back in Lvov. Before her marriage
She worked in a cigarette factory; I don't know
What the brand was called. She  spoke Yiddish
And Polish and German and English; she also 
Could get by in Russian and Ukranian.
She disliked hearing the Emperor Franz-Joseph mocked.
She'd stay awake late, reading. She might keep a newspaper
For forty years, waiting for the time to finish it
Her son Morris died when he was twelve. She never
Spoke about him after she sat shivah. I like to think
He turned up now and again in her dreams wandering
Through the broad streets of Lvov with her or dancing
Down by the river.

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.

IRINA

Arriving just too late to save her, Irina’s angel
Gave her company the entire way from the roof
Of her apartment building to the pavement
In the courtyard. My great aunt
Had excellent reasons for stepping off a roof.
Her angel had his reasons, too, for being late:
There was something wrong with his visa;
His wings did not match, one being longer
Than the other, so that when he wasn’t careful
He’d fly long, lazy circles, repeatedly finding
The Bug River beneath him when he’d meant
To trace the Vistula. Also, he was absent-minded
Once saving an old woman in Dublin
When he was scheduled to rescue a child
In Warsaw.

                    Irina, my grandmother’s older sister,
Listened to the angel as they fell, occasionally
Trying to get in a few words. She was a musician
Though what sort I don’t know. For years
My imagination gave her a violin but now
It demands stranger things, as if she deserved
Krumhorns and sackbuts and tall therebos.
It could be that she sang; perhaps her angel
Provided some sort of counterpoint.

SUM

Fourscore and ten years ago my grandmother

Brought forth on this continent a new baby

Who’d have been called Naftali Meyer

In Lvov but here was Nathan Martin

And married my mother

And flew with angels

And talked with cats

And earned a death

More gentle,

More kind.

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.

REASONS

When she was in her teens
My father's mother Esther
Worked in a cigarette factory.
True, hers was in Lvov, a city
Which, depending on the weather
Was Polish or Austro-Hungarian
Or even Ukrainian, but not Spanish.
Nor, I am fairly certain, did she
Have affairs with bullfighters
Or get sprung from jail by Don Jose.
She sometimes danced by the river
But probably not with gypsies.
For these reasons, and others,
Including Bizet's decision to die
Ten years or so before her birth,
There is no opera about her.