After all, life is full of tragedies:
LABOR DAY
(fragment)
"One day, you’re a blond boy with a tooth missing;
the next, an old man gasping for air.
It comes to nothing, really, hardly
a moment on earth.
Not a sentence, but a breath, a caesura."
WIDOWS
My mother’s playing cards with my aunt,
Spite and Malice, the family pastime, the game
my grandmother taught all her daughters.
Midsummer: too hot to go out.
Today, my aunt’s ahead; she’s getting the good cards.
My mother’s dragging, having trouble with her concentration.
She can’t get used to her own bed this summer.
She had no trouble last summer,
getting used to the floor. She learned to sleep there
to be near my father.
He was dying; he got a special bed.
My aunt doesn’t give an inch, doesn’t make
allowance for my mother’s weariness.
It’s how they were raised: you show respect by fighting.
To let up insults the opponent.
Each player has one pile to the left, five cards in the hand.
It’s good to stay inside on days like this,
to stay where it’s cool.
And this is better than other games, better than solitaire.
My grandmother thought ahead; she prepared her daughters.
They have cards; they have each other.
They don’t need any more companionship.
All afternoon the game goes on but the sun doesn’t move.
It just keeps beating down, turning the grass yellow.
That’s how it must seem to my mother.
And then, suddenly, something is over.
My aunt’s been at it longer; maybe that’s why she’s playing better.
Her cards evaporate: that’s what you want, that’s the object: in the end,
the one who has nothing wins.
MOUNT ARARAT
Nothing’s sadder than my sister’s grave
unless it’s the grave of my cousin, next to her.
To this day, I can’t bring myself to watch
my aunt and my mother,
though the more I try to escape
seeing their suffering, the more it seems
the fate of our family:
each branch donates one girl child to the earth.
In my generation, we put off marrying, put off having children.
When we did have them, we each had one;
for the most part, we had sons, not daughters.
We don’t discuss this ever.
But it’s always a relief to bury an adult,
someone remote, like my father.
It’s a sign that maybe the debt’s finally been paid.
In fact, no one believes this.
Like the earth itself, every stone here
is dedicated to the Jewish god
who doesn’t hesitate to take
a son from a mother.
APPEARANCES
(fragment)
"It was something I was good at: sitting still, not moving.
I did it to be good, to please my mother, to distract her from the child that
died.
I wanted to be child enough."
THE UNTRUSTWORTHY SPEAKER
(fragments)
"Don’t listen to me; my heart’s been broken.
I don’t see anything objectively.
I know myself; I’ve learned to hear like a psychiatrist.
When I speak passionately,
that’s when I’m least to be trusted."
"That’s why I’m not to be trusted.
Because a wound to the heart
is also a wound to the mind."
NEW WORLD
As I saw it,
all my mother’s life, my father
held her down, like
lead strapped to her ankles.
She was
buoyant by nature;
she wanted to travel,
go to theater, go to museums.
What he wanted
was to lie on the couch
with the Times
over his face,
so that death, when it came,
wouldn’t seem a significant change.
In couples like this,
where the agreement
is to do things together,
it’s always the active one
who concedes, who gives.
You can’t go to museums
with someone who won’t
open his eyes.
I thought my father’s death
would free my mother.
In a sense, it has:
she takes trips, looks at great art.
But she’s floating.
Like some child’s balloon
that gets lost the minute
it isn’t held.
Or like an astronaut
who somehow loses the ship
and has to drift in space
knowing, however long it lasts,
this is what’s left of being alive: she’s free
in that sense.
Without relation to earth.
FIRST MEMORY
Long ago, I was wounded. I lived
to revenge myself
against my father, not
for what he was—
for what I was: from the beginning of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved.
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