43. A Young Jewish Girl Takes The Violin

       A Young Jewish Girl Takes The Violin

               (for Francis and Diane Klein)

 

Take this precious thing with your fluttering fingers,

take this grown shape in your lengthening hands,

take it and hold it,

take it as your own--

                           its brittleness like the brittleness

of bone, its  hollowness like that

of bone, its thinness like

starved bone--

                    and do not ask

what marrow might be inside

its casket--

               love

your lovely little fiddle, your doll which won’t

wet, but if you practice faithfully will someday

cry real tears.

                  This desert of dried wood

with its briefly inhabitable oases is all

the Promised Land, your wandering bow an Ark

of Covenants:

                   when you are done, remain

to bow, for you are not alone, but nation.

 

42. Why I Will Never Be Conscripted

 

            Why I Will Never Be Conscripted

 

I have a five-chambered heart, a type of growth

common to those conceived in the shadows of

the smoke of the firestorms of World War II.

Lungs, the blood goes in and comes out brighter;

liver, the blood goes in and comes out richer;

kidneys, the blood goes in and comes out cleaner;

heart, the blood goes in and comes out faster;

there, the blood goes in...goes in...what is left vents

into lymph, that lesser-known fluid whose vessels

vary from person to person, time to time, as they carry out

obscure functions of rectification and ablution.

It has a different name than the rest of my body.

My name is Barna, Hungarian for brown,

perhaps from Nostratic’s bora, like bear and beaver,

or maybe Varna in Sanskrit, which, I am told,

also means brown, as in having darker skin.

Its name is English-for-German-for-Polish: Auschwitz.

I do not know what it means. Late at night,

at times I like awake afraid of falling

too deeply unconscious until I am certain the sun

will heat my tissues enough to wake me and save me

I hear it between beats: like the in-breath

before sighing, a sound that might be made by

someone so badly beaten it hurts too much

to weep, a quiet blurting like the names

of lovers or of mothers emitted in sleep

by starving men who are dying of dysentery.

This--the chamber bullets would have to pass through

first--prematurely hardened--a nuisance,

interrupting the sweetness and the smoothness

of four/four music with its fitful fifth-beat clenching--

is the part of me which is Jewish--although I have

no Jewish ancestry except through my child

and wife--a retrograde genetic movement

to all those constitutional defects that are passed

down, as most of them are, from father to son.

 

 

41. Regional Energy Study Foresees Nuclear Plant

      Regional Energy Study Foresees Nuclear Plant

 

"The 'Energy Use' study recently prepared for the Lake Champlain Basin Study has some important implications for Addison County, particularly since the author blithely implies that our lakeshore would be a lovely site for a nuclear power plant some day."--The Valley Voice, Nov. 22, 1978

 

This time, as I take the long street into the sunset that ends

downtown, it is early spring, and the only snow left is the unexpected

remnant of a freak storm, holding its own for a moment because

the sidewalk plow banked it. Leaning over my shoulder, the baby

stares at what looks like embers of cold glowing. Nothing else

interrupts the slow gathering of dusk, except

 

This time, as we follow Park Street toward

the common, he weighs more. As his backpack straps cut into

my old shoulder separations, through hazes of pain, the bobbing clumps

of snow, like scorched styrofoam or splattered shaving cream, become

completely improbable, riveting. Too tired to force my own perception

to function, I try, and fail, at my son's--so that

 

This time, making our way along the path from home to

trading post, the unseasonably long sunset and preternaturally intense

afterglow expose ore from which the ground has eroded, a metal

as far surpassing platinum as platinum goes beyond silver, and

radioactive. Instead of a vision transfixed

by a one-year-old's wondering,

 

This time, as we pass down the street where as a child I grew

out, it is the sickening horror of being trapped in some far northern

strategic reserve that impresses upon me the fading scene: housefronts

only some shackhappy timber crew's notion of a practical joke, sagging

wires jury-rigged by the Company, primeval straight lines of untouched

nuggets blazing a trail for outsized machines--we hear them

 

This time, as we leave the street where someone I never was changed into

someone I will never become--we hear the dispassionate roaring of

The Owners--we, the benighted natives, ridiculous in our ancestral

insistences, left here for hazardous duty, ousting us being more trouble than

not. My son is restless now, as a world of strange sights turns into

a whirling of stranger sounds.                              

 

40. Training Flight (18 months)

                                     Training Flight

                                       (18 months)

 

My son

                  your fears

                                    I can do nothing to relieve

but agree

                  that you recognize

                                    without being told the jets

                                                      are warplanes do not belong

                                                                        above the barn

                  and long before I can hear

                                    something

                                                      like the Fourth of July fireworks

                                                                        which were too loud

                                                      and the thunderstorm

                                                                        which was a threat

                  that you come scudding like

                                    a small boat drive to dockside by

                                                      the groundswell and chop of

                                                                        a mountainous gale

goes to my heart

                  you realize they are making

                                    a web like those of the spiders you

                                                      know despite our acting

                                                                        might

                                                                                          bite.

 

Your mother too

                                                      fears the dark

I too

                                                      the knock at the door by night.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

39. The Button Jar

                  The Button Jar

              (for Katherine Burt)

 

You know another family

has died when you see one at a rummage sale, its buttons

like lost babies, little faces gazing

sightlessly out. Easier to guess

how many there are than what they might have meant, now

that the flesh they distracted from has disappeared

like the spaces between them. How little

bone and ivory, metal and wood and glass, tell of what lived

while these medals were lost--the Hundreds of Years War

between women and the fashions the Age of Harnesses

invented to keep them struggling against

themselves--hoopskirts, hobbleskirts, waists--

outlasted at last, the buttons anonymous, free

of the fingers that trembled against them before the wedding,

the fingers that clumsily fumbled them in the night, the little'

fingers that finally learned to string them.

What commemorative coin struck

for the years of being stricken? What tabernacle of hosts

to celebrate holding together as a religion?

I buy the button jar

from one of those ageless volunteers, as yellowed

and shapeless as connective tissue, who keep the town's

charities from turning arthritic,

for one dollar: it belongs

scattered on the floor around my young son

instead of money, or in the collection of

the three widowed sisters we visit, who always have cookies

ready, and keep their best buttons displayed

on velvet, where they sit like little dishes at some

unending Thanksgiving dollhouse feast--or put them

on gifts like the one the high school girl wrote

was her earliest recollection: "When my grandmother died

on my third birthday she gave me a doll with blue eyes

that moved.'' Closer to fourscore and seven than three,

the youngest sister trembles everywhere while

she shows me their treasures except her great-

grandmothering eyes, which even if watery fix upon me, steady

and bright, bright, so I’ll never forget.                                            

 

38. Meeting The Great-Grandfather

       Meeting The Great-Grandfather

 

No hesitation: set down, he runs

right to the old man and climbs into his lap

as if he'd always been doing it. In the silence

of everyone else's amazement, his great-grandfather

tells how when he was less than three

his mother left him to go to America,

and he threw stones at the train that took her away. But

having seen his own grin

reflected, he remembers something else:

how he would cry and cry and people would come

and pick him up and give him things to keep him

from crying--but on the inside, he would be laughing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

37. Nightshade, Also Known As Deadly Nightshade

  Nightshade, Also Known As Deadly Nightshade

 

"You ate some berries? What color? These? How many?

Uh-oh. These can make you throw up

really, really bad, unless you take

something called ipecac--thank goodness we have some

or else we might have to go to the hospital."

 

We wait. And time has run out of space, and space

is out of air. The very idea of poison.

That the human body is so weak one swallow--

or it could go on for years and no one would know

until they dug you up again, if ever.

Or we could be poisoning bodies we can't yet see,

beyondness that it takes more than one person

to make, that might be killed by a single action...

 

It doesn't work, he throws up EVERYTHING.

"I'm sorry," I tell him. "Next time we'll do it faster."

 

 

 

36. “Picked up a hammer in his little right hand”

 

       “Picked up a hammer in his little right hand”

 

He loves Superman,

Batman the same as Superman, Wonder Woman

as much as either--Battlecat, Prince Adam,

He-Man--but not

Skeletor, not

Darth Vader, not

John Henry. He doesn’t want the side of the record with

John Henry on it, because he believes in Superman,

Batman, Wonder Woman, Battlecat, Prince Adam, and He-Man, but not in dying, and at the end,

John Henry lays down his hammer and he dies.

 

 

35. The Milk Runs Out

                     The Milk Runs Out

 

Less milk, this time, again. I gave her more grain.

She must have used it to shiver out more winter

fur--it’s getting hard to milk without pulling

hair. I try to  milk her dry--humans

feed twins, triplets--mothers have started milk

from nothing to breastfeed their adopted children--

fathers, apparently, supposedly...

No go. Spring’s firm flesh and quick liquid

seem to have settled into a lumpy mush that

hurts the both of us to squeeze--she kicks--

I can’t get her to settle down again--

there won’t be quite as much next time. And now

I have to board out most of the light. Though light,

like love, means milk, warmth comes first: our first

big winter storm is reaching down across

the northern tier like some huge polar predator’s

padded claws. The old sun seems to walk

the south in clouds of dust down at the end of

the valley between two mountain ranges, while here

we get a sort of tea of light straining

slowly through shadowed branches of wind-blurred trees.

And then it will be cold, her water frozen;

drinking less, she’ll give less milk, and less

of a reason to be prompt and punctual

each day. Some of the time she’ll give less milk

from cold, not letting down when the udderwash

dries off; and other times from being in heat.

Probably we’ll make one final trip

to the city, while the girl next door decides

to be a veterinarian’s assistant.

Christmas, I’ll be out here, glad for once

the kid puts everything in his mouth, and Ginger

will kick the milk, and it won’t matter, even

to wipe it up. I won’t be here on New Year’s.

 

 

34. (Sometimes when we nap together)

       Sometimes when we nap together I wonder about telepathy, whether it might influence our timing. You seem to know when I have an urgent need for more rest, and then when I want to wake up you oblige--not always, but sometimes so harmoniously that it seems out of the ordinary. Of course it could all be explained away: scarcely perceptible flutter touches, subliminally significant changes in breathing, alterations of galvanic skin response. But might not such physical synchronizations enhance telepathic influence?--perhaps be a precondition? Why should one form of communication automatically be assumed to exclude another. Certainly that’s not the case with making love...

       Yesterday you awoke from a two-hour afternoon nap at four o’clock. You had been willing to stay abed with sleepy old daddy from 6:30 to 9:30 that morning, after an 8 p.m. bedtime the day before, so I assumed that you would stay up. So I put you on my chest to sing for you--our usual ritual upon waking from a nap. For some reason I felt like singing some of the old blues/spirituals, “Motherless Children,” and “Then You Must Have That True Religion” (the one I sang one time at the Rochester Zen Center, during a three-week training program, back in the guys’ communal bedroom, pounding out the rhythm on the floor with one hand), and Bessie Jones’ “O Death.” And one I know is a favorite: you may possibly be the only baby in Vermont who has the lynching-era black unaccompanied prison song “Niggers Ain’t Got No Justice In Atlanta” as a lullaby. You went to sleep again, and stayed on my chest for over an hour, until your mother came home and alerted you to her presence by banging chunks of wood into Stokely’s almost-expired fire.

       At one point during that nap, “my heart went out to you.” I broke apart and reformed around your center, and could see how illusory my particular form of existence is. The fact of fatherhood, so hard to contemplate: my heart splits, and you rise out, light and lithe, spirited--. Not a moment of enlightenment, but a sense that all the pieces of enlightenment are there, and in motion, a puzzle on its way to completion.

       --to dance, I hope, on my grave.