HOME

Once in a while my dreams take me
To a small village, whose narrow streets
Are filled with low wooden buildings.
Folks nod at me in the marketplace;
At times I'll nap in the bath house
Where the ghosts make space for me.
Never have I doubted where I was:
My grandmother's much-missed home town --
The only place, she felt, which did things right.
But now I find she came from a large town
With wide streets and gleaming bridges
Where statues looked out on the river.
There were more statues in the opera house
(The opera house? Why would a shtetl have an opera house?)
Including a bust of John Gielgud's great-grandmother.
The bath house ghosts know of her town
"You're much better off here," they tell me.

BY THE WATER

After a day swimming in the lake at Patchogue

My mother would hear her father’s car horn;

She’d climb on the running board and ride home

Clinging to the car. What model was it, I wonder;

How far did they go? Did they talk on the way?

Did she close her eyes and listen to the wind

Or did she watch the world flowing by?

How easy it would have been to ask her!

My father’s mother when she was young

Danced by some river in Galicia.

There was an emperor then: Franz-Joseph

She rather liked him. I imagine it must be something

To have an emperor. Perhaps you feel sorry for folk

In ordinary countries, who have only a king

Or the poor people who must get by

With an archduke, an elector, a president.

TOWNSMAN

If you seek his grave you’ll find it

In the wrong part of the cemetery

Not with the dead of the hometown

He never saw. His father glances

At the memory of the watch

Which lies in my dresser drawer.

His mother says “Look! It’s Natie!”

And there he is, come by starlight.

TWO POEMS FROM THE ARCHIVES

What shall I call him? Ten years further on

He’ll be my father but now, 1941, he is fifteen

At one in the morning, as usual

He is awake. The new day expects

To find him reading or thinking

Or raising a casual hand to welcome it.

In the kitchen, his mother sits rapt,

Reading a newspaper she has saved since 1924.

Real news endures though the pages are yellow.

In a few moments she’ll climb to the attic room

Bringing her youngest an apple, a cookie,

Some tea with lemon in a blue glass cup.

In 1905 in Dublin, New Hampshire

Patrick McAleer held a rabbit

I have seen the photograph of them

Captioned Patrick McAleer holding a rabbit

The rabbit – small, brown, alert -- looks untroubled;

He, though, would have called the picture

Rabbit in landscape, with McAleer.

It is hard to tell if McAleer is smiling

His enormous mustache hides his lips

But he is certainly calm; pleased, I think,

That he, the rabbit, the leafless trees behind them

Are so casually become immortal.

(Patrick McAleer was quite real, as was the rabbit. They both worked for Mark Twain. I suspect that McAleer was the Patrick who was Jonathan Swift's servant {see Journal to Stella, which you really should read} -- he has that look about him).