READING

My father’s primer,

Might have alternating chapters

First from a knight’s

Then from a dragon’s point of view.

Sometimes they’d meet

Just to talk things over.

Who could use such a book?

The princess, I suppose,

Unless she understands them

All too well already.

TWO

My father wrote that while
Most men look up for salvation
I tend to look down. This is so
And one of the things God and I
Have in common. Think about it;
What direction else can He look?
Some days it seems salvation
Is slow in coming or wastes time
Amusing small things by the way
But God and I can be patient.

IN LIEU

Since my father is dead and his father as well
To whom can God look if He needs a job
Or a friend He can trust? I don't own a shop
That makes women's coats and the angels --
For reasons I'm sure they think sufficient --
Never once took me flying. Still, I suppose
I can lend Him a few dollars and listen
If He really needs to talk about His problems.

VISITOR

Because I am my father's son, God
Sometimes drops by, usually late at night.
He never says much; time makes no sense
To Him, of course, since He is everywhen
He has promised to tell me if He finds
A road whose bend He cannot see around.

AT THE LAST

No one ever doubted my father

Was a Jew. He’d met God

In a synagogue and posses of angels

Had flown him about when he slept.

(Once, when they were running late,

The angels dropped him the last few feet

So he woke as he was falling into bed.)

On his last day, though, Raven the Trickster,

Whose stories he knew well, sat nearby

Singing him to sleep with the adventures

The two of them had shared

STORIES

My father's alter ego was a magician,
Powerful and diligent, yet his spells
Frequently went awry. Mongoose
Rarely had money and was usually
Looking for work. For a while
There were two of him, but his wife
(Known only as Mrs. Mongoose)
Sent one back into the mirror.
Before he was Mongoose, my father
Had experimented with being
The greatest detective in the world
A master of disguise, quite capable
Of solving the most baffling crimes
If he hadn’t been so often frustrated

By the fact that he was a flowerpot.

YELLOW DOG

Abraham Lincoln, said my father, knew of a tonic

That could make you a new man, with enough left over

To make a little yellow dog. The first part is only sense;

Who does not make a new man each time he wakes

Choosing among those pieces of him that lie to hand?

This memory but not that one; this vice but

Not – never again! – that virtue too dearly bought.

From suchlike things I have conjured myself

At least ten thousand times, without a tonic.

What concerns me now is that yellow dog
Making itself impudently of the parts left over

Bad enough when he barks at me when we pass,

I on my way to work and he off to chase sticks and cats

And other dogs, but worse- far, far worse! –

Those days he grins at me or offers a sympathetic paw.

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.

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.

MORE FROM ABROAD

BARCELONA -- FOR NMS II

Since you were here,
Here and well in Barcelona,
Zadig and Voltaire
Have formed a partnership
And opened a small store.
I assume Zadig gets first billing
Because even a fictional prince
Outranks a mere Immortal.
This city, capital of a country
Which once existed
And may exist again, but is now
Cater-kin to Shangri-La,
Is right for them both. Both prefer
Lands where the king's writ
Does not run and can barely
Maintain a brisk hobble.
I don't know what they sell.
If you were still alive, though,
You would surely tell me.

REPORTING

BARCELONA -- FOR NMS - I

Since you were here
Since you were here in Barcelona
St. Jo-an has posted on the walls
That he currently has openings
For those who want to pray to him.
He is a reliable general practitioner
Particularly good with those
Experiencing many troubles.

AS FAR AS I CAN RECALL

When I wake up I am no longer
Fluent in Chinese so I have
Only a hazy notion of what
Li Po was telling me last night.
Something, I think, about
He and my father sharing a dream.
Afterwards, each of them
Was followed by the other's shadow.
Up to now it’s been wondered
Why a poet dead since 762
Knew the batting averages
Of the1939 Brooklyn Dodgers.

PATIENCE

That elm there and another
Two blocks away and a twisted willow
Beside the duck pond still wait
For my father's walks to resume.

ELSEWHERE

Occasionally I call up a sheet

From the 1940 census. There my father

Is thirteen, the youngest of nine people

Living in his parent’s house. Doris,

His sister, is still Dora and Jack,

His sister Anne’s husband, lives there too.

All but one of the surviving children

Live together; Harry is elsewhere.

They weren’t much for black sheep

But if they had been Harry

Would have applied for the position.

In a later world where I existed

Harry was a sort of irate spirit

Spoken of but seldom seen

But he lived – somewhere and did –

Something, perhaps many things.

My inventory of facts on him is small.

Like my grandfather, he could perform

Lightning calculations. He went west

To work for a New Deal project

He had a mean streak; money

Never stayed long with him. Sometimes

When my father sang he’d remember

That the song was one Harry taught him.

PICTURES MY FATHER HUNG TOGETHER

Lost in their music, the horn player,
The fiddler, the straggle-bearded flautist,
Look down but see nothing.
Over in the next painting, men dance.
Two of them hold hands; another
Has just leapt in the air. An old woman

Wearing  a faded red kimono
Is standing on her porch, watching.
If time moved for them, if the song
Could go on, just three notes more,
The woman would smile.

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.

LI PO

My father first met Li Po
On a warm evening in 1946
At Brooklyn College.
Li Po was urging his shadow
To dance and the moon
To drink some wine
From a clay jug.

They next met in 1961
On a subway train.
My father was going
To his night job.
Li Po spoke of a woman
Whose husband died
Defending the Jade Pass.

Somehow, by 1985
They'd become inseparable
At times they made do
With one tall shadow
Between the two of them.

FLIGHT

Over the years my father convinced himself

That he’d never woken hovering over his bed

Still, he wondered.

My mother had an ancestor named Aaron

Who weighted his pockets with stones

To avoid floating off.

Savonarola’s jailers found him asleep in his cell

Gently bumping against the ceiling.

They burned him anyway.

When King Sweeney recovered his wits

He ceased being able to fly. When I go mad

I will remember this.


(And then, an old poem about the King:

You think, perhaps, that it is easy to be mad;

“Farewell, Reason! I’m off; I’ve slipped your chain.”

I tell you it is not. Three years, seven months,

Six days I have followed Sweeny, who was King

And now lives in trees. Madness, like much else,

Takes practice. For the first six months, Sweeny

Could understand never a word the birds said

And feared their endless tweeting would drive him sane.

He could fly as soon as he and reason parted

But was clumsy at it, crashing into trees,

Perching awkwardly at night, liable to fall.

He flies well now; threading through the forest

Listening to the curlews and laughing at their jokes

(His courtesy is royal; curlews’ humor is dull).

His dreams tell him he will be king again

Unable to flutter a foot above the ground.

I prepare against that day.)

DOGS

A dog often turns up

In my father’s stories.

Filled with good will,

He offers sound advice

Which no one follows.

I wonder if he is related

To Snowy, Tintin’s dog?

If Tintin listened to Snowy

There’d be no adventures;

The books would just show

Bars where we’d watch

Captain Haddock drinking

For page after page after page.

SONGS

My father sang his children to sleep
But my mother thought her voice
Would breed bad dreams.
I wonder who told her this?
In a pleasant alto voice
She'd sing quietly, to herself,
When she didn't know I listened.
My father knew every lyric;
My mother made hers up as needed.