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The door it opened slowly,
My father he came in,
I was nine years old.
And he stood so tall above me,
His blue eyes they were shining
And his voice was very cold.
He said, “I’ve had a vision
And…
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 think of my father who believes
a Jew can outrun fate by owning land.
Slave to property now, I mow
and mow, my destiny the new Egypt.
From his father, the tailor, he learned not
to rent but to own…
I set my table with metaphor:
the curling parsley—green sign nailed to the doors
of God’s underground; salt of desert and eyes;
the roasted shank bone of a Pascal lamb,
relic of sacrifice and…
Would you, mama, believe if I told
That everything here is changed into gold,
That gold is made from iron and blood,
Day and night, from iron and blood?
—My son, from a mother you cannot hide—
A…
Yesterday, I dumped on my son the following story:
That my father was a cyclops and, of course, had one eye,
That my fifteen brothers wanted to devour me,
So, I barely got myself out of their…
In the Bronx, in Brooklyn and in New York City,
My cousins all have stores.
Seven cousins with seven stores, like commandments.
Business people with long lists of going bankrupt.
And my family-name…
She was still upset,
she wanted to tell me,
she kept remembering
his terrible hands:
how she came, a young girl
of seventeen, a freckled
fairskinned Jew from Kovno
to Hamburg with her uncle
and…
And veins web her temples,
and my father pins on the orchid,
and my card names her the best mother.
But Alzheimer’s or arteriosclerosis (the end is the same)
praises him ad nauseum,
but accuses my…
I have a son, a little son,
a youngster mighty fine!
and when I look at him I feel
that all the world is mine.
But seldom do I see him when
he’s wide awake and bright.
I always find him sound…