ASE

If you want the semblance of my Great Uncle
Open Alice in Wonderland to Tenniel's picture
Of Humpty Dumpty. The likeness is uncanny
Except Humpty looks arrogant and Ase
Looked only kind, like a benevolent ogre
His child-eating days long behind him.
Surely he wasn't always bald and craggy
With a grinning, gaping mouth and eyes
Droop lidded but still seeing wonders?
Unlike my grandfather, his younger brother,
Who was small and deft and dapper
Ase was large and sprawling. His fat fingers
Could not do card tricks. What choice then
But to learn magic?

16 GAMES OF CHESS

When his wife died in childbirth

On February 25, 1927 my grandfather Joe

Felt his heart stop and then contract

Until it was small and hard and round

And cold as a marble. Ase, his brother,

Brought him home and sat with him.

Joe's deft fingers shook. For three days

He sat in the dark. On the fourth,

My great aunts Jenny and Lena

Brought his chess set from the apartment

Joe never visited again. Jenny opened the blinds

While Lena set up the board. She won

Fifteen games in a row.

She thought she was winning game sixteen

When Joe's eyes narrowed. "Mate in five," he said.

"So you remember how to talk?" said his sister.

A GRANDFATHER

My mother’s father Joe and I didn’t suit each other

He was small and neat and had clever hands

As well as a suspicious mind. A watchmaker,

He thought the world did not keep accurate time;

Something wrong with the gears perhaps

Or – he deemed this likely – the Great Maker

Had put something into the works backwards

He took precautions; his own watch was always

Set fast so that he knew to never trust it

His brothers and sisters had been born

At European ports as his family slowly felt its was

Towards America. The eldest was Russian

There were Germans too, and one from Liverpool

Before my Grandfather, the New Yorker.

When Joe’s young wife died Ase, his brother,

Der Englisscher, took him in. Ase played poker

But for Joe he learned to play chess. Mabel,

Ase’s smart and stringy wife, did added cooking

And cleaning for two years until Joe could manage

Crookedly to survive. I am not sure

He ever managed to forgive them for this.

On his deathbed – my father was a witness –

Joe woke for a moment and muttered

“What a wonderful, wonderful world!”