Made in Detroit (7 page)

could not speak. The weight

of history pressed on Anna’s chest

that night and finally she wept—

mourning the sister never known

and her mother’s decades of silence.

So much in Tanakh is a mixed

bag, a tangled message. Eliyahu

and Elisha come to the Jordan;

the elder prophet strikes the water

and parts it for them. He makes

a safe dry road through what

would drown them. We all try

to do that for those we cherish.

Elisha resists show—fiery

horses and chariot—and witnesses

the whirlwind and is rewarded

with Eliyahu’s spiritual power.

He too can part the waters.

We hope for the gifts our mentors

have tried to teach us, to carry on.

When he travels, boys mock

his bald head and he sends bears

to savage forty-two children.

What can I learn from this? To take

myself seriously into violence?

We pick and choose what to

cherish of those tales, our minds

picking at them for spiritual sense

so we can part the dangerous waters

of our time to cross our Jordans.

The songs we join in

are beeswax candles

burning with no smoke

a clean fire licking at the evening

our voices small flames quivering.

The songs string us like beads

on the hour. The ritual is

its own melody that leads us

where we have gone before

and hope to go again, the comfort

of year after year. Order:

we must touch each base

of the haggadah as we pass,

blessing, handwashing,

dipping this and that. Voices

half harmonize on the brukhahs.

Dear faces like a multitude

of moons hang over the table

and the truest brief blessing:

affection and peace that we make.

L’shanah haba’ah b’Yerushalayim

we say every Pesach, concluding

the haggadah. Some say it piously,

some with pride, some almost

embarrassed, some with mixed

feelings, some balk at the words.

In the murderous times that came

down so often in the Diaspora,

it was said with fervent hope

that some where, some time

we could, would belong, be

free. But Jerusalem, the golden,

the city on the hill, is two

cities, one blood-soaked, fought

over for millennia, again, again.

The other is a city of the mind.

Utopia comes as a walled garden

or as a city, a community of peace

we have never reached, where

justice and equality are daily

as water and still as precious.

May we always travel onward

toward that good place even

if like Moses we never arrive

struggling through dust and blood

to unite the two Jerusalems

in one shining city of peace.

How hard it is to keep Shabbat,

to stop what crams days, evenings

like a hoarder’s house and to thrust

every worry, duty, command,

every list of What Is To Be Done

into a mental closet and bolt

that door. We feel half guilty

not to be multitasking.

Surely this space we eke out

is indulgence. Where’s

the end product? How can we

walk into silence like a pond?

The computer, the smart phone,

the fax machine summon us

to attend to shrill voices. How

can we justify being idle?

How can we listen to that voice

that issues only from deep

stillness and silence? How

can we ever afford not to?

Tonight I light the first skinny candles

of celebration and the single fat

candle of grieving, for this first

night is my mother’s yahrzeit too.

I say Kaddish that never mentions

death but in me is a hole that never

quite healed over, that sweet lonely

scar of missing that goes on

year after year singing its husky

lament for a tattered life, for lone-

liness inside an asbestos bungalow

where she cleaned and cleaned

and cleaned what could never

be clean, in the fog of acid

and smoke from the factories.

All that was white yellowed.

All that was right passed away.

All that had been soft hardened

to shards of shattered hopes.

All that was promised her, lied.

Yet in that asbestos almost

prison, she delighted in sweets,

in baking what she wanted to eat.

She gobbled books whole,

she held sway over the neighbor

women reading their palms.

Gossip quieted her pain. Others

suffer too, she said. Amein.

Mercy for the wren baby pushed

from the nest by the bigger hatchling—

egg the cowbird deposited.

Mercy for the green turtles caught

in the sudden cold of the bay

when the nor’easter blows.

Mercy for the pregnant cat thrown

out to starve, nursing her five kittens

among garbage and broken glass.

Mercy for the geese the golfers

want poisoned because they disturb

the green beside already polluted pools.

Mercy for the birds trying to fly

south on ancient routes, blinded

by our lights, dying on skyscrapers.

All around us are creatures we barely

notice, trying to preserve their only

lives among our machinery,

among our smog and smoke, inside

our radiation, among the houses and

roads built on their once habitats.

In the Herring River, the mummichog

lives along with eels, alewives, green

and bullfrogs, snapping turtles

and muskrats. Of all these

the mummichog is the smallest

but the hardiest. It can withstand

heat and cold. Polluted waters

do not sicken it. It survives most

poisons and is predicted to outlive

us all in nuclear disaster.

It schools with hundreds of kin

who move as one through muddy

waters, feeling their way. On

the full moon it releases its eggs

and on the new moon too making

sure there will always be multitudes

of mummichogs. I, who am far

less sure of my survival, salute

you, for in spite of all we do to

destroy, you’ll repopulate earth.

When I drive around my village

poking through half the buildings

are what they used to be: the upscale

gallery I never enter was the post office.

On busy mornings in summer what

car acrobatics were required to pick

up the mail, the parking ample

enough in the winter, now jammed.

The gas station that’s turned into pizza;

the restaurant that failed five

different owners and now stands

vacant, its most recent sign fading

to
GNR ATO
, a warning perhaps

to future entrepreneurs. The fire

station now sells leather clothing

from May to October. Houses

from which friends were rushed

to the hospital to die or brought

back home to do it in peace.

The field where the white horse

Ajax browsed. Once in a thunder

storm, he climbed onto my porch

and stuck his head in the window.

Stood there awhile and then walked

slowly down the drive and away.

The candle factory became the library.

The farm was cut into development lots.

A hurricane brought down a forest

like skinny dominoes, now a field.

The wrecked boat’s bones no longer

protrude at low tide. Millionaires’

summer houses fell over the cliff.

Used to be, used to—my head crammed

with useless memories: an attic in

a house someone buys, wondering

why the owner kept all that old junk.

Lava from an island volcano

plunges into the sea. Vermilion

and black landscape by day,

at night the white torrents

resemble television reports

of rush hour traffic.

Where water and fire

collide, a column of smoke

and steam gushes upward,

water boiling as the lava

did. Nothing living could

survive this fusion.

How it roars as it meets

the water. This is a tropical

sea, not cold but lava

is boiling rock, magma

melting all it touches

till water snuffs it.

Now it turns back to rock.

Excitement. Smoking.

Irresistible fire consuming

all in its path. Till abruptly

it’s doused and returns

to a previous state.

So it goes sometimes

with lovers.

Walking through the luminous rain

sliding down her bare arms as if

the city wept, she dreamed instead

of fire, drops of it small as beetles.

I could walk through fire, she

thought, but she was wrong. Her

summer dress went up in a single

torch and she screamed

like something torn. I see her face

still, sometimes when I think I am

falling asleep and then don’t,

her mouth a perfect circle.

We die different ways. We beg

to go painlessly as rain falling.

The kitten from the shelter hasn’t

learned her name Xena yet. But how

wonderful that leap: those nonmeows

humans utter mean something.

When I mention her name, Puck

turns his head and looks at her.

He has grasped that noises belong

to beings and objects and actions:

out, chicken, no, come, sit. How

does a creature without language

suddenly put that attachment to-

gether? Human babies preprogrammed

to stare at faces, still take a while.

They babble long before they speak.

Then there’s the long learning process

that words are not the thing,

that promises only shape air, that

cries of passion are nonnegotiable,

that we walk through our days

followed by biting swarms of lies.

An icy wind down from Quebec

freezes the homeless teenager

sleeping in a carton under

the rumble of a highway bridge.

Walking in High Toss, I find

the corpse of a dog some

hunter shot. By accident?

In anger? For sport? To

the dog, why would that

matter, the paws outstretched

as if to beg, head chin down

between them, flies swarming.

A friend is back in chemo.

All food tastes like metal
,

she says.
I have no appetite
.

It’s the third time of poison.

Today the whole world shines

as if someone polished every

single twig. The air is vanilla

ice cream. We are warm together.

So much can go wrong

we are almost afraid to be happy.

I will be safe in the grass.

I will be as safe as I was

when my mother cuddled me

in the high grass.

I will have plenty to eat.

I will have not only the wild

grasses and tender fruit

but carrots and cabbage.

No dog will see me, no

coywolf, no prowling cat.

No hawk will spy me

from a dot in the sky.

I will be safe and full.

I will be warm as when

my mother cuddled me

content in the high grass.

Let it be so, let it be

so, let it be so all

the sun and into the dark

when the coywolves howl.

I love you
in one voice is an arrival,

in another a curse. It can be a wall

imprisoning. Or a door opening

to who knows what pain or joy.

When it’s spoken sometimes

the listener flinches, wants to

force it back into the mouth

that dropped it like a net.

Sometimes it has been waited

for so long it has lost its juice

wizened now, a winter potato

in the bottom of the sack.

Sometimes we fall into it

willing to take what we can get.

She knows she is right at breakfast,

the correct cereal with fatless milk.

Afterward she runs herself gaunt.

I weigh less at forty than at fourteen,

she confides to just about everyone.