AUGUST SANDER'S PHOTOGRAPH LABELED "OFFICE WORKER"

The picture is dated 1928 so
The smiling woman is not
My mother, who was a baby
In New York and not yet qualified
To do office work in Berlin.
An alternate version, perhaps.
Her desk is immaculate --
Another strike against her.
Right angles were never friends
To my mother. A typewriter sits
In a lowered part of the desk.
My mother typed so fast
Her fingers blurred while words
Scrambled and tumbled toward her
Trying to reach her before
She needed other ones entirely.

COOKING

When my mother cooked, the ghost
Of her stepmother's mother
Would watch from the shadows
Muttering approval. Yes,
So much and no more salt; yes,
Stop kneading -- the dough needs rest.
If you tap the egg just so
It will obey you, cracking cleanly.

CATS

Twice today a white cat's crossed my path
The first time disguised as Lady Mary Coke
Whom half the world thought beautiful
Making the other half wonder at them,
Saying "She is so very pale. She has
An appallingly bad temper. She is
Entirely lacking in eyebrows. How, then
Can you consider this white cat fair?"
The second time was in an old Spanish book
The hero, raised in England, slowly remembers
His early life in Cordova. His family refuses
To come into focus but he suddenly recalls
A white cat with which he used to play.
My mother would have warned me that
A third white cat is surely on its way.

TIME PASSES

There are none now to believe me,
None to take it as more than a small joke,
But my mother could conjure into existence
New distant relatives who would rise,
Stretch themselves, blink a time or two,
And believe they'd been born as others are,
Had mothers and fathers, siblings, friends,
Had moved and breathed, had rejoiced and suffered
And, strange to say, all the world assented
To this impudent imposition,

Letting them conduct themselves
As if they’d legally slipped across the border
Into the real world.

                                  Eleven years ago she died
And I fear that all those she called here --
All those good, eccentric people --
Have begun to flicker and to vanish
To be again as if they never were.

ENCOUNTERS

 When she was 4, her father decided

It was time for her to meet her mother.
They took a trolley to the cemetery. For a while
My mother pictured hers as a polished stone
With my mother's name, Lillian, written on it. At 15,
My mother went back on her own having decided
To let the first Lillian have the name to herself.
It took less than a minute to say. The explanation
Took just over two. It seemed impolite to just leave
So my mother -- now Patricia -- gave a detailed synopsis
Of Random Harvest, in which Ronald Colman,
  An amnesiac veteran, is in love with Greer Garson.

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.

SEPTEMBER 23, 2006

When my father’s brother Moshe died –

He was twelve; my father three –

All mention of him ceased. Years later

My father asked hadn’t he once

Had another brother? His mother cried

But said nothing. Some families

Are like that. He died young? Do your best

To forget him. My mother’s mother

Slipped on ice and died giving birth to her.

My mother surely used her stubborness

And cunning to find out everything

The grownups didn’t want to remember.

I can imagine her treasuring each slip

Listening carefully for the moment

Her mother’s ghost would appear

As part of a story or to date some event

“That was just before Lillian quit her job

Because her friend Essie was fired,” or

“I met Lil’s old boyfriend on the train today –

The one who worked in a bakery and brought

Huge loaves of bread when he dropped by.”

My mother, who wrote down many things

Wrote almost nothing about her mother

Except that they shared a name and that

She died because she slipped on ice

On a day when most of the ice had melted.

She surely knew everything though

And what she didn’t know she would

Have made up had I asked.

SZYMBORSKA

There was a crowd of strong, small, humorous women
With sharp eyes. My mother was one of them
Along with any number of her aunts, cousins and friends
(Her sister was another type altogether, unable
To see through a stone wall. On the other hand,
Like Yosemite Sam or Wile E. Coyote
Tamara could absent-mindedly walk off cliffs
And not fall unless she looked down.)
Some of this breed stayed behind in Poland;
Pictures of the poet Wislawa Szymborska
Make it clear she could love you
Despite the faults she knew you had
And which she'd list on slight provocation.
More; in emergencies she could create
Virtues in you no one else could even imagine.

EVERYWHERE

In September my mother's death
Seems everywhere, peering from boxes
Hanging in closets, marking the place
Where I stopped reading a book.
How irksome to find her death
Sitting at the breakfast table
Listening to music on the radio!
How delightful to remember her!

HOME FROM THE LAKE

Now that they're both dead
Do my mother and her father
Still fight or are there days
She is eleven and, at twilight,
Waits for him by the lake
Knowing he'll come for her
Knowing he'll let her stand
On the running board
Almost all the way home?

BITING RAY MILLAND'S NOSE

I planned to write about my mother
Who loved poetry -- her talk
Was where quotes met misquotes

And had lurid and glorious offspring.
Or then there are movies;
She saw almost every one
From, say, 1935 to 1944
So if I come now upon the scene

Where Claudette Colbert bites
Ray Milland's nose I hear, from 1940,
The echo of an approving sigh.

BLONDE AMBITION

When my mother was twelve
She decided it was unlikely
That five foot nothing
Would ever be statuesque.
There was still hope, though
Of turning out charming or,
Better still, fascinating,
Elusive, dangerous, untameable
(Something like the Dragon Lady
With a better sense of humor.)
If she was merely cute
She'd join the Foreign Legion.

FROM 1940

Beyond the computer screen is my mother
In 1940, looking at me from a census summary.
She is 13, still called Lillian, living in northern Brooklyn --
The 23rd Assembly District -- with her father Joseph, 43,
Her stepmother Fannie, 38, and her half-sister, Tamara, 6.
How young they are! My mother has reached
Her full height of five foot nothing.
She has been accelerated, as we used to say,
Skipping two grades, making her
A very short high school student. If this is a weekday
She is wearing a middy blouse. If it is Saturday
She is going to, or is at, or has come home from the movies
About which she knows everything a bright 13 year old
Can learn from reading the news and fan magazines
With a skeptical eye. (It will never be easy
To fool my mother.) Perhaps she is in the kitchen,
With Fannie's mother (Jennie, 67), explaining in Yiddish
The plots of movies she's seen. Fannie and my mother
Have been at war for years. Jennie and her husband
(Charles, 76) have joined my mother's camp.
Jennie has taught my mother Yiddish
So that, once she has children,
My mother will be able to say things
They don't understand.
I’m not certain, but I think she's just told Jennie
That some man in 2016 is thinking of her.
"Eh," says Jennie, "just a ghost; don't mind him.
Everyone knows ghosts are crazy."

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.)

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.

AN OLD WOMAN THROWING KNIVES

My mother's stepmother's mother

Ruled the kitchen. When arthritis
Forbade her using can openers
She’d hurl meat cleavers across the room
At cans of condensed milk set on a table.
Her loaves of bread were painted

With egg yolk. She used a long feather

So old her own mother might have known

The aboriginal goose from which it came.
 ("She'd heard of germs," my mother said,
"But did not believe in them.")
When my small mother needed love here
Was where she found it.

TWO INCIDENTS

I wake up and my grandfather's ghost
Sleeps in the chair beside my bed
When he wakes he will halfway open his eyes
And pretend he is not lost, not angry.

My mother, at 11, felt studying Deanna Durbin
Might teach her to be charming.
This would likely come in handy
If the Prince of Wales came to Patchogue.
(And if he doesn't come? asks Essie.
I'll still be charming, my mother says.)

SHARING

Since she died time has not marched on for my mother
But ambled, moseyed, meandered, hopped on one foot
And then on the other, jumped rope (single and double-Dutch)
Gone off on tangents and sometime flowed uphill
So that my 10 year old self accepts days
When he eats lunch (a hamburger on rye bread;
Cream of mushroom soup from a shallow green bowl )
With me as I was at 7 months (some sort of glop, eaten with gusto)
Or as I may be at 96 (some sort of glop, eaten with gusto).

MEETING THE EMPEROR

One day in her home town my grandmother Esther

Saw the ghost of the Emperor. This surprised her;

Franz Joseph was alive and even if he wasn’t,

Why would he be selling used clothes in Lemberg?

Still, she had no doubt. This was the face she’d seen

On stamps and coins, in schools and post offices.

She had always a soft spot for the Emperor;

And many decades later, in far-off Brooklyn,

Deemed herself still a reasonably loyal subject.

Her husband could, if he wanted – and he did –

Vote for Roosevelt but she, having grown up

With a monarch, considered a president

To be something inconsiderable. Franz Joseph

Did not roam about asking people to elect him.

Esther was 15 that day in the market with no intent

Of ever leaving Lemberg. Sometimes in her dreams

She flew, but when she looked down, saw the Poltowa,

Its bridges filled with statues which craned their necks

To see her flying by, waving at them.

(Her ninth child, my father,  also flew in his sleep

But I don’t know if he ever saw the Poltowa.)

Brave, she walked up to the Emperor

Who was extolling a pair of almost new pants

To a skeptical buyer, stretching the cloth

In his semitransparent hands. He gave her a smile

Behind his enormous mustache. How we have dwindled!

I cannot talk to dogs; I cannot fly in dreams

The closest I’ve been to an emperor is not very close

Though Dwight Eisenhower walked into my mother,

Knocking her down, three months before I was born.

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.