KAMIONKA STRUMILOVA

Kamionka Strumilowa is 41 kilometers from Lvov

And is called Kamionka because of the huge

Rocks which wandered in with the glaciers and,

Liking the look of the place, stayed on.

Esther never thought much of Kamionka;

She was of stately Lvov which could,

If it were hungry, have swallowed Kamionka

And had Przemysl for dessert. Max, though,

Was fond of his home town and their son,

Born 7,182 miles away, knew the names

Of every street and every family. When ghosts

From Kamianka find themselves in New York

They sometimes come by though my father,

Since he died, is seldom found at home.

IN LIEU

All day it has hammered on my chest
Telling me to write it into being
But all I see of the poem is its eyes
Which are frustrate and red.
Like a bad psychic I make vague guesses
"Something with flowers? You have lost
Someone whose name begins with a letter.
You will meet an apostrophe and fall in love."

Many poems have come to me and been lost
Or gone on their way.
                                        So what is different here?
Perhaps this is an old poem which first
Came to my grandfather in a dream
Forgotten when he awoke. Or my grandmother
Saw it looking at her from a heap of tobacco
And would have written it down, or at least
Told it to the girl next to her but the foreman was near
And the pay wasn’t bad – three hellers and a half

For rolling a thousand cigarettes.

Maybe the poem dogged my father for weeks
But love poems don't have red eyes and in 1946
Love poems were what he most wanted to write.

There may be something familiar about the poem;
Did it mutter its name to me on the L train

While I was coming home from high school?
Good luck with that! My mind was filled, hoping
The girl across the aisle would look back at me.
Could it be one I wrote, very badly, in college
And it has limped through the years, a caricature
Come to see if the years have taught me anything?
I make no promises, but I'll see what I can do.
Sit down; I’ll need time. While you wait, tell me
Things you know of my grandfather's dreams

Or of quick-fingered young women
Rolling Polish cigarettes in a half-lit room.

FROM MAX'S POSTHUMOUS JOURNAL

            After I died many things troubled me, for I had been unprepared, besides being, at my best, of an uncertain temper. What bothered me most often, though, was something trivial – the fact that I had no pockets.

            As a child I had delighted to stuff my pockets full of oddments, including marbles, strange rocks, small pieces of metal, and the keys to doors long since gone to dust. Older, I spent much time with my hands in my pockets – self-contained and self-sufficient, a small, sulky universe which had set up business in defiance of the larger ones around him.

            For some reason, all the newly dead are given cats. A ghost’s cat is much like any other save that it needs no litter box and can speak. Now that I think of it, it may be that I was given to the cat, and only my egotism makes me see it as having been the other way round. In any event, the cat with whom I was associated called himself Braggi;  he was unsympathetic about my need for pockets. “They only make you lazy,” he said.