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Without Jews, no Jewish God.
If, God forbid, we should quit
this world, Your poor tent’s light
would out.
Abraham knew You in a cloud:
since then, You are the flame
of our face, the rays
our eyes…
I forget meticulously
I forget scrupulously
my native landscape
my daily landscape
I forget the ragged
I forget the billowy
clouds in a sky
clouds over a town
I forget to the end
I forget…
When I was twelve, I read The Diary of Anne Frank.
I identified with her having to live
stories above a busy street
over a business, and having to keep quiet
for hours at a time.
I’d pad about on…
I always thought
I had been here before.
Each year of my patched-up life
I mended the fabrics
of my decrepit, tattered world.
In memory I recognized faces and smiles,
even my father and mother…
Credo in a kind of
American jewish Hamlet-like
bagel, too round for action
yet leavened enough by contact
with the near-dead past—you call it
landscape, I call it history—to provide
a layered vantage…
For Jews, the Cossacks are always coming.
Therefore I think the sun spot on my arm
is melanoma. Therefore I celebrate
New Year’s Eve by counting
my annual dead.
My mother, when she was dying…
Once upon a time you dressed so fine
You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?
People’d call, say, “Beware doll, you’re bound to fall”
You thought they were all kiddin’ you
You used to…
How many know
the number of creatures is endless?
So many know,
only a gasp in their questions is possible.
All that fullness—
of wounds that won’t scar over.
pain’s grillework
persisting in…
You will come back.
You will, with God’s help, come back
With a far-off, alien look.
(I’m preparing myself,
I already know,
I’ve seen how they come back.)
You will sit in your regular chair, unsure
A…
On a day transparent with light
like a landscape by Monet,
my childhood broke away
from a small Jewish town
and glided on ice
blue in the distance—
while a small cloud hovered in me
like a cloud of a…