Back then I had a personality
Much too big for me. I'd look
From a window then race
To look from another pretending
I was fully staffed and garrisoned.
Years later I read Beau Geste
In which two men pretend
They are a small besieged army,
Propping up corpses on battlements
Crawling about to take shots
From here, there, some other there.
Making things worse, the two of them
Hate each other. I shook my head
Really, wouldn't a smaller fortress
Have been more practical?
The poet Vogel's ghost
Is circulating her resume
Pole -- from Lvov
Poet -- mostly unread
Jew -- dead since 1942.
I have no work for her
But chat for a while
She knew my grandmother
When Esther masqueraded
As an orphan. Later,
She was friends with
Esther's sister Irina.
In one of Vogel's poems
Three grey buildings
Go for a walk.
(The poem says four
But one of them
Was an impostor.)
Near death my mother
Spoke of her stepmother
Who'd been hard
And unloving towards her.
"I was no picnic
To raise," she said.
On the one hand,
Admirable. On the other,
How difficult to lose
An old and faithful grudge!
At my mother's funeral my father
Read Cavafy's poem about Ithaka
From a copy my mother made.
Any available paper had been
Fair game for her so Odysseus
Made his long way home
Sailing along the narrow margins
Of a page filled with news
And a picture of two models
Made happy by a spotless plate
Held high and glinting in the sun.
Every time
I visit your grave
There seem to be
More shadows
Standing around
Or pulling weeds
Or making patterns
With the pebbles
Left on your stone.
At times God, Who has
Illimitable choices,
Decides to be fictional.
Those who pray wake up
To see exiting angels
Who've left a pre-printed card
"We regret that, for now,
God is a collection of
Literary tropes and
Psychic projections.
Your patience is appreciated
While we work to correct this."
Those with urgent problems
Of the heart are well-advised
To submit prayers to
Tashtego, Queegqueeg and Dagoo,
Late of The Pequod.
Sophisticated supplicants
Will wait for the second
Or even third response;
The first will always be
"Try throwing a harpoon at it."
The last public letter writer write
In sunlight or moonlight. When there was
No sun or moon, a candle might serve.
Sometimes you'd find her on the edge
Of a circle of homeless men around a fire
Burning in a trash barrel. When there's no light
She turned into a string of quiet words
And was carried home by the wind or,
If he felt like it, her cat. Even now
A lit match and a pool of copperas and soot
And oak gall might summon her at need.
