Happy People

Galina, the Russian barber in Vilnius,
Has finished telling me about the troubles
Of her son and her daughter-in-law.

She adds an afterthought:

But there are no happy people anywhere;
The only happy people left
Are alcoholics with friends
Who buy them drinks."

Different Dogs

Walking to school
With my son
And our black lab
We meet at the intersection
Our crossing guard
A large African-American woman
Who, if the light is red,
Will bend down to pet the dog
And the dog will jump
To lick her face
And she will repeat
What she often says
That the dogs in this neighberhood
Are all so friendly,
So different from the dogs
In her part of town.

One day my son will ask
Why the dogs are different
And I still don't know how
I will answer him.

Dear Ms. K.

Browsing through
A poetry anthology
I came across a bio note
About you.

It said you came
From Kishiniev
And wrote poetry
In Russian and English.

Which is so weird
Because I love
Russian and English poetry
And used to travel to Kishiniev.

Once I even spent a night there
Boozing with a Russian poet
Whose poems were praised
By Brodsky himself.

Two pretty girls
Joined us that night
They both went with him
When they closed the restaurant.

I googled you
And you look very pretty;
Why didn't we meet
When I was in Kishiniev?

It also said that you
Divorced your husband
For not appreciating
Poetry enough.

Yesss! I thought,
It is you and me
Defending Pushkin and Auden
Against philistines like him.

But then it mentioned
The name of the poet
Your tiff was about--
And I have never heard of him.

So now I feel
Kind of small;
It might be better
If this letter remained unsent.

Culture Shift

'Look into your mirror
And repeat after us
"This is who I am today
This is not who I will be tomorrow"'

Management consultants
Had gathered all employees
In the main meeting hall
Charged with bringing about
An enterprise-wide culture shift.

Small mirrors had been distributed to all employees
Who now repeated the consultants' words monotonously
Thinking to themselves, perhaps, this isn't as bad as layoffs.

Amount of Decency

Old-time China missionaries
Recount a tale of an outbreak
Of violent anti-foreigner riots
When merchants and teachers
Were imprisoned and
Placed singly in cells with
Local petty criminals;
They learned to keep in touch
By tapping on the walls
Passing messages from cell to cell
In English, German or French.

The chain would be broken
If any one of them was
Taken out and shot;
The chain would be restored
When the Chinese prisoners
Would listen to the sounds
Of tapping on one side of their cell
And repeat it on the opposite wall.

They knew nothing
Of what the messages meant;
They knew how to increase
The amount of decency in the world.

Union of Unpublished Poets

We,
The many,
The deserving,

But ignored,
Unappreciated,
Lacking a topic,
Subject to blocks,
Fearful of rejection,
Shy of a blank page,
Bereaved seeking solace,
Born in wrong time and place,
Enthusiasts of social progress,
Out of tune with the language,
Coming to terms with our divorce,
Never more than honorably mentioned,
Disgusted with the crap that's published,
Saddled with families needing a breadwinner,

Do hereby
Demand that Congress
Have our poems published
As a matter of congressional earmarks.

In Praise of Geometry

The richest kid in the class--
His Levi's, authentic to the little
Piece of cloth sawed to the back pocket,
An object of intense envy
To all the boys who just knew
That girls would follow nothing else--
That kid got up and went to the blackboard
And with one, well-placed, chalk line
Showed beyond any doubt
That every triangle's interior angles
Sum up to 180 degrees.

It is quite possible
That everything I remember
About the kid, the blue jeans and the girls
Wasn't so. But the proof is still valid.

High School Danse

High school dance from long ago
Remembered in every detail;
At the far end of the school gym,
A band, four boys, just like us,
Except tonight, oh no, tonight
They belong to an altogether superior race.

At the near end, our teachers,
Dressed up and looking out of place
Policing the length of girls' skirts
And trying to keep their breasts
(Such as they were) from any contact
While slow dancing with the boys


The long walls were for wallflowers,
Each sex buttressing its own,
Eyeing the other side furtively
While pretending to watching the band,
Between them a vast space
Sparsely populated with dancing couples.

Every now and then, a boy
Would peel himself off his wall
And walk across that length
That seemed to expand to six soccer fields
As he tried to cross it; his object dimly perceived
As he was looking at the floor in front of his feet.

And he just knew that everything about him
Was so visible to every girl that would soon start
Pretending she was too tired to dance:
His pimples, his glasses, his sweaty hands,
His unfashionable shoes, and his pants
That never saw the inside of a foreign currency store.

"At least being a lousy dancer won't matter much now."
He would think to himself walking back across the vast space.

Homage To Non-Nabokovian Translators

--"What are you writing, Little Peter?"
--"An opera, Vassily Ivanych."
--"About me?"
--"When the plenipotentiary will call you in, you will find out,"

Is an extremely funny joke. In the original.

We, Soviet Writers

We, Soviet Writers,
Wholeheartedly salute
The faithful guardian of the Revolution--
The Chief Directorate of Political Administration--
And call on the Government to award the OGPU
The Order of Lenin.

We shall devote our creativity
To the service of the proletarian revolution!

We shall fight ceaselessly
Against the agents of the bourgeoisie!

On the literary and art front,
We shall rip off the masks of class enemies!

Death to counterrevolutionaries and wreckers

(The Literary Gazette, 11/20/1930)

Troubled In Warsaw

Confidential help lines
You can call in Warsaw
(from Gazeta Wyborcza,
Poland's main daily):

AIDS;
Drug addiction;
Depression;
Homelessness;
Child abuse;
Family violence;
Alcoholism;
Old age;
Dawn's syndrome;
Physical handicaps;
Pregnancy;
Eating disorders;
Religious sects;
Trafficked women;
Parkinson's;
Alzheimer's;
Smoking;
STDs;

and the last entry reads:

Jewish--For people who discover their ancestry and are having adjustment problems.

Vladimir Putin and Philip Larkin

Vladimir V. Putin,
Whose grandfather cooked for Lenin
Is reading Philip Larkin's
"Homage to a Government",
Sent to him by his London embassy.

Putin's English isn't too good
But Larkin's unadorned prose
Gives him few problems.
He finishes, nods to himself
And says to his underlings
Who stand at attention
Around his desk:

"Now this is exactly
What I've been saying all along;
The only thing I don't understand
I why they call me a dictator
Who's dragging Russia
Into the Middle Ages
And they call him
England's best-love poet".

His underlings wonder
Who this Larkin guy is anyway.

Two Russian Women

The first one,
I know from the painting--
"Young Girl with Peaches".
The painter is Valentin Serov,
The year is 1887,
The girl name is Vera,
(Which means "faith").
In a modest sunroom
Of a Russian country house,
The girl is sitting at a table
With four peaches in front of her;
Light of quiet hope
Permeates the room.

The second woman
Makes a brief appearance
Fifty years later
In Akhmatova's "Requiem".
After Kirov's murder,
Thousands upon thousands
Were placed under arrest.
Long lines of silent women
Queued at Leningrad's prisons' gates
Trying to find out
The fate of their menfolk.
Standing in line,
Akhmatova saw an old woman howling.
Perhaps her name was Vera.

Two Mathematicians

In 1953, two mathematicians met
In a restricted security area
Of the Walter Reed Army Hospital;
One was dying of bone cancer,
The other came to cheer him up.

They were famous
Though not for their mathematics,
Beautiful as it was;
The security was there because
One invented the computer
And the other the nuclear bomb.

They came from provincial cities
Of the Austro-Hungarian Empire;
Their math had saved them
From what happened to their families.

To distract his friend from pain
The visitor picked up a book
Lying on the night table
And read in the original Greek,
They both remembered from their youth,
The Melian dialogue--a tale
Of the strong and the weak
And their confrontation
Twenty three hundred years ago.

You can, if you wish, connect the dots
Between the dialogue and the bomb;
I, for one, wish that my high school
Left me something, anything,
To comfort a dying friend with.

Returning from USSR

Some came back with reports
Of dirt, stink, and poverty.

I gave them to read "A Room and a Half"--
About a poet's one room Leningrad apartment
Partitioned by a wall of books.

Others came back envious
Of the deep souls of the Slavic people.

I gave them to read "Shock Therapy"--
A medical miracle story of
Making corpses work in Kolyma.

Rubber Band

The boys' name was Kuhl,
The tallest and smartest kid
In Mrs. Kowalczykowa's class,
Grade School No. 23 in Warsaw.

He showed me once
A rubber band with names
Of all the cool kids in the class.
Mine wasn't among them.

Everyone knew his father was a big shot--
In charge of all the state farms;
Later we learned it was a demotion
From Deputy Minister of State Security.

I met him, in my mind, several times
Somewhere on a Warsaw street;
He'd recall me with difficulty
And would have no memory of the rubber band.

I would want to know
What happened when he found out
What his father's job was
In the Ministry of State Security

He would say: I asked no questions
He was a wonderful father though I know
There were plenty of wonderful fathers
Rotting in prisons he had supervised.

And then he would say: let me ask you
The same question and the conversation
Still, in my mind, would fizzle out.

Samuel S.

Samuel S.,
Lodz Ghetto survivor,
Is prepared for my visit--
Rows of photographs
Are spread out on his coffee table.

Him, he says, his name is Stark
Was an associate professor,
A dogmatic communist before the war,
Became a devout Catholic after the war,
A homosexual. friend of the family,
Never believed in God.

This one's name is Fishman,
Lost his whole family,
Was sick in hospital in Israel
A friend came to visit him,
Looking for him,
Spelled his name in Hebrew,
They called, "Where is Pishman?"
Everyone was laughing,
In Hebrew, "p" and "f" are the same.

Little Iosif

His ambitious mother
Sent Iosif to an English language school;
Rich kids found
His accent hilarious.

He begun to loath
His mother,
The other kids,
The English language,
His countrymen in general
And everyone else.

He loved computers
And dreamt of taking over the world.

When he dropped out of the school,
He changed his name to Silikonov.

His troubles with police started early.

Kohen

With his Alzheimer progressing
Father tells me
That he is a Kohen
And that so am I
And that we had rights and privileges
During synagogue services.

Privileges? What privileges?
I think to myself,
You haven't been near a synagogue
Since you were a child,
Since before your father,
Gassed on the Serbian front,
Returned home to die
Of influenza in 1918;
Your mother married a man
Who wanted you out of his house
And you ended in an orphanage
From where you emerged
A carpenter and communist
And no longer a Jew,
All of which God
Must have approved of
Since it save you your life
In what happened later.

I don't say anything;
What would be the point?
Except perhaps to note
For the benefit of above mentioned God
That according to some cosmologists
All possible worlds exist out there
Which makes it possible
That somewhere
A frail but otherwise healthy old man,
Who's had a boring life
Avoids cemeteries,
Doesn't touch the dead and
Looks forward to being asked
To recite the Priestly Blessing.

Barren Hill

The TV documentary
Lingers on a barren hill
That changed hands many times
During the Spanish Civil War
With great many casualties
On both sides

When you go back
To the beginning
Of what had caused this bloodbath
In villages and towns across Spain
You will find no more
Than a marital tiff.

Medical History

Life insurance is serious business--
The nurse sent by the broker
Was suitably solemn.

My medical history was boring--
My parents' equally so;
As for the extended family, I lied.

I said they'd died of old age--
The truth wouldn't fit
On an insurance form.

Born in Middle of Awful Century

I was born in the middle of an awful century
To cripples jumping on their amputated limbs
To make the kids and themselves believe
That things were normal.

The lie was seen through eventually
But it served its purpose to teach us
The virtue of not asking questions

Missing Poets' Unnatural Biographies

Killed on 'Bloody Thursday' (April 4) on the way to rail cars destined for Belzec;

Died in Auschwitz; some works saved in Ringelblum's archive;

Arrested in 1952, died in the GULAG;

Deported from the Lodz Ghetto, died in Auschitwz;

Arrested in 1949, died in 1952;

Died in the Ghetto either in 1942 or 1943;

Arrested in 1949, shot August 12, 1952;

Deported to the GULAG in 1937, died in 1940;

Killed in Krzemieniec in the spring of 1942;

Deported from the Warsaw Ghetto, died in the Poniatowa camp;

Killed in the 1937 purge;

Killed in an Aktion in Lwow with her husband, small son and old mother;

On the way to a gas chamber with other Belgian Jews, threw a brick at an SS guard and was shot on the spot;

After the children in his orphanage were murdered, attempted to hide with a peasant family but was tracked down and shot;

Murdered by the Nazis in Lwow;

After the outbreak of the Soviet-German war, sentenced to death based on false testimony;

Died in the Warsaw Ghetto; date unknown;

Arrested in Bialystok by the Nazis and taken in an unknown direction;

...Moved to Otwock where he was murdered in 1942;

Killed in Lachowicze in 1941;

Murdered by the Nazis in Pomerania;

Murdered by the Nazis in Ponary;

Died in his native town in a Nazi pogrom with five brothers and sisters.




(From an anthology of Yiddish poetry)

Family Tree From Provincial Poland

Your father is not your father;
Half of your family is not your family.

Do you want to hear more?

During the War, your father was a POW,
Your mother hid a Jew--a lawyer from Lomza.
He stayed a year and had to leave
When neighbors started asking questions.

You are his son.

When your father came back from the POW camp,
He was told you were your aunt's illegitimate son
Your mother took in to protect her sister from shame.

So now you know why your father treated you the way he did.

The new farmhouse built after the War--
And the orchards--was paid from the money
Your Jewish father had left for you.

If you go back to claim it,
Your brothers will kill you.

Eine Kleine Dick Madam

"Eine kleine Dick Madam
Fuhr mal mit der Eisenbahn;
Dick Madam, die lachte
Eisenbahn, die krachte
Eins, zwei, drei,
Und du bist frei!"

The words of a German nursery rhyme
Mother taught me when I was little.

Which was a strange thing to do
Given the family's history and its silences.

About the missing extended family
Replaced by fake aunts and uncles;

About staying home when other kids
Went matter-of-factly to religion classes;

About cases of oranges that arrived in winter
And were carefully hidden from neighbors;

About letters in strange script
Written late at night...

...

Perhaps Mother couldn't help herself
And smuggled a nursery rhyme
From my Grandmother who otherwise didn't exist.

Fortuitous Poem by Rudi Blesh

The voice sings and then--
On fateful descending notes--
Echoes its own phrases
Or imitates the wind,
mournfully and far away,
In huh-uh-ummm,
Subsiding like a moan
On the same ominous,
Downward cadence.
The hign, sighing guitar notes
Vanish suddenly into silence
As if swept away
By cold autumn wind.
Plangent, iron chords
Intermittently walk,
Like heavy footsteps
On the same descending minor series.
The images--
The wonderer's voice and its echoes,
The mocking wind running
Through the guitar strings
And the implacable, slow, pursuing footsteps--
Are full of evil,
Surcharged with the terror of one alone
Among the moving, unseen shapes of the night.
Wildly and terribly,
The notes paint
A dark wasteland,
Starless,
Ululant with bitter wind,
Swept by the chill rain.
Over the hilltop
Trudges a lonely,
Ragged,
Bedeviled figure,
Bent to the wind,
With his easy rider
Held by one arm
As it swings from its cord
Around his neck.

(On Robert Johnson singing his "Hellhound on My Trail")

In Memoriam of Felix Weinglass

Felix Weinglass
Was a peasant
From Tarnopol province
Of pre-war Poland
And a self-educated
Talmudic scholar;
He wrote in Polish
A book of 113 pages called
"The Spirit of Talmud--
A Small Collection of Talmudic Citations
From All Walks of Life".

The book was published in 1939
When the author was 76.
Nothing is known about his fate;
A single copy of his book survived.

Conversation with Friend

"Don't be daft",
She answers,
To my question if
She had ever thought
That she would live
In a democratic country.

"The wild optimists among us
Hoped for a slightly larger
Margin of freedom:
A few books published
From the prohibited index,
Being able to travel,
Perhaps as far as Yugoslavia,
Having an argument with your friends
Without checking for bugs in the walls.
Seems laughable now."

"Was it then?"

"No."

"So what was it about?

"I did what I did
Because it was a decent thing to do,
Even if it accomplished nothing,
Except it made it perhaps easier,
For other to do decent things.
Perhaps not much
But for me it was plenty.
That's why I kept quiet
When they were looking
For posts to fill after the changes."

She

Art of Socialist Shopping

Where I grew up,
You entered the store softly;
You ignored the empty shelves
And you waited politely
For the sales ladies to finish chatting.
You didn't approach them closely
But you tried to establish eye contact
And when you did, you apologised
For disturbing them. Then it was time
To let them know what you were after
Which you did using carefully chosen words:
"Perhaps, you might have some..."
That "perhaps" was very important--
It signalled that you recognised that
Not having any of whatever you were after
Was the expected norm, and that if, on the contrary,
They did have some of it somewhere,
Under the counter or in the storage area,
You were prepared to properly appreciate
Your good fortune.

If the gods of socialist commerce
Were kind, one of the sales ladies
Would tear a corner piece
From a sheet of brown packing paper,
Roll it into a cone
And pour into it your bounty
Of sugar, or wheat, or rice,
And you would hold that cone
At the sharp end, to make sure
It wouldn't unroll as you walked home
Very happy.

Best Years of His Life

You know, what hurts,
He said to his son,
Is how much I helped him out
When he came new to be our boss;
So many were against him
And I worked so hard to turn them around.
But then when I wanted to go on my own,
I had every right, you know,
He turned against me,
Just like that. It hurts.

--Gee, Dad,
My son said,
It sounds like you
Gave him the best years of your life;
Maybe you want to call Mom
To tell her that now you know
How she felt when you dumped her.

They Had a Wonderful Marriage

They had a wonderful marriage.

But then he
Found on-line
A book called
"How My Husband's Affair
Became the Best Thing
That Ever Happened to Me".
He thought it was a funny title
So he gave a book to his wife
As a joke.
It wasn't funny, she said.
Indeed was not, he found out.
She was having an affair
And didn't feel it should be
The best thing that ever happened
To her husband.

So she left him.

Telemachus

Telemachus,
Searching for his father,
Meets Helen who
Twenty years after the abduction,
Has lost none of her beauty.

She likes the budding warrior;
He feels uneasy under her gaze.

She turns to Menelaus and says:
"Just remember,
None of it would have happened
If you only me enough."

Stepmother

Exhausted and silent,
Driving back
From the nursing home,
We arrive
At her appartment
Which used to be ours.

She makes tea,
She sits down,
She talks about the time
When she took my father dancing
And she did such an excellent job
Leading him around the dance floor
That a stranger came up to their table
Knelt down, and begged my father
For a permission to dance with her.
"Your father," she tells me,
"Never was happier, never was happier."

I want to leave but don't
It is only an old lonely woman
Recollecting her happiness--
An existential moment,
Dear to poets and those
Who fear their own old age.

She Was Short, Plump, and Cheerful

She was short, plump and cheerful,
Her large bosom stuck in my boy's memory,
She was one from a line of peasant women
Who got a Warsaw residence permit
By working as a domestic for us.

After she has left,
Snippets of my parents' conversation
Hinted, with regrets, that there was
Someone in her native village
Who wanted to marry her.

She reappeared later
Carrying a swaddled baby
Asking my mother's help
Finding another position
(Hers having been filled).

Without being asked
And without hushing her voice
She said to everyone around:
"The man was no good
But I got a little girl out of it".

I was shocked and indignant--
I knew from novels
How women were supposed
To hide their shame instead
Of flaunting it with pride.

Now I imagine her
Helping with her grandchildren
With all the cheerfulness
She had
Taking care of me.

She Says "Hello" to His Would-be Lovers

Having made love to him,
She reaches for a marker and says:
"I'm an open-minded girl
And don't mind if you have
Affairs with other women,
Provided they keep off
My favorite parts of you
Which I will now mark
Off limits for them.
Right here, the most important part,
You shouldn't be surprised,
You know my strong feelings about it;
Then your belly, I will mark if off too
Since I like to use it as a pillow;
Your torso, a playground
For my finger nails, must, as such
Be stricly off limits as well;
Now your back, I don't mean
To be greedy but restrict it I must:
When I take my little bites here,
You get these cute white marks
That then turn such a lovely red;
As for further up, I will just run
My marker around your neck--
Your face is mine to gaze at
When I can't sleep at night;
Your hair, I am afraid I need
To hold on to when you try
This disappearing trick in my cleavage;
We are left with the extremities--
Your arms, I am sorry, but
I can't let go for sentimental reasons
Having to do with our first date;
Which leaves your legs:
Here, I insist on keeping them
On account of what happened
When I saw them first,
Sticking ouf of your tent
And I caught myself thinking
That the rest of you was
As lovely as those legs;
And now I know
What you are thinking:
That I am not fair
And that I am not leaving you enough
To have an affair with,
But that is not totally true:
Right here: The top of your head,
Your bold spot. I will circle it.
Your lovers can have it.
I will even write on it,
'Hello'"

Snowflakes

Before getting ready for bed
You go out to check
The snowfall's accumulation:
Should you start shoveling now
Or get up earlier than usual.
You look at your car's vanished bumper
And at the cold halo of the streetlight
Where swirling snowflakes
Make their brief appearance.

Those snowflakes transport you
Fifty years back to another snowfall,
In the Tatra mountains where you parents
Sent you for "fresh air"; your parent's friends
Had a housekeeper who came from a small village
In these parts, which is why you were here
Breathing fresh air with the housekeeper,
And the friends' daughter, a girl your own age
Which was seven or eight, perhaps.

During the day you played with her in wet snow
At night, the housekeeper would visit
Her friends and relatives in the village.
She'd come home drunk, collapse in her bed and snore.
The snoring was the girl's signal
To get our of her bed leaving her nightgown behind
Come under you covers and invite you to do "things" to her.

You were too scared to move or say anything
Except to point to the window over the bed
To try to interest her into checking
Whether she could see any snowflakes that would
Promise fresh snow for the next day.

The girl has now been dead for many years,
Died young of breast cancer in New York City,
I still can't force myself to write her name.

Marriage After the Kids Are Gone

In Valby,
Copenhagen's unglamorous quarter,
Red-brick apartment buidings
Covered in graffiti,
In Hotel Rossini,
Where the locals stay
Avoiding tourist traps downtown,
At breakfast time, an elderly couple
Stands at the restaurant's entrance
Surveying the buffet table.

Without a word, the separate;
She approaches one end of the table
With cheeses and butter
He, at the other end,
Starts toasting slices of white bread.

Sitting down at their table,
They exchange cheese for toast
Still without a word.

With the kids gone,
That's what marriage is:
Knowing exactly the trade--
What cheeses and how dark the toast.

Irish Rabbi

Looking at our six year old son
Lost in a book about baseball,
His finger playing with
A ring of his strawberry blond hair,
His body swaying rhytmically,
My half-Irish wife says:
You know how you joke
About how you can't
Have a drink in a Jewish pub,
Well, at least you have
A little Irish rabbi at home.

Lenif, II

Two years after its discovery
Lenif is fighting a war
With its neighbors: Benif and Genif.

Benif expected
Lenif troops to come
From the South and North
But they came from the East and West.

The trap didn't work out,
Thought the troops were well-armed;
They had swords but no shields
Because they had no coat-of-arms.

They had no coat-of-arms
Because they couldn't agree on what it was
The fight over it was so bad
That there was a civil war about it.

Lenif, I

The country of Lenif
Was discovered
By my son, age four.

It was located
In Western Siberia;
Lots of empy land there.

Lenif was landlocked
Unless it bordered
A warm sea to the south.

Its neighbor was called Benif,
Mostly friendly,
With an occasional war.

The spoke opposites in Lenif
But they also had
Their own words:

"Mom" was "Balko",
"Dad" was "Lalko",
"Hello" was "Lazha",
"Good-by" was "Vashakoo".

A detailed map of Lenif,
Of which many were made,
Is still available on request.

Mashed Potatoes and Sourmilk

Sister had the chore
Of peeling the potatoes
When she got home from school
And leaving them
Covered with water
In a small pot
Ready for when
Father came home
And lit the stove.

Mash potatoes and sourmilk:
The potatoes were hot,
And sourmilk cold,
And there were two ways to eat it:
The volcano way and
The winter day.

The volcano way
You sculpted a volcano
Out of the mashed potatoes
And poured the sourmilk
Into the crater and the stuff
That overflew on the slopes
You called the lava.

The winter way
You flattened the mashed potatoes
On your plate and then made roads
By dragging a fork across,
And then you poured the sourmilk
And watched it fill the roads
While saying "Winter is coming"
And pretending that you were freezing.

Look at My Sister, My Stepmother Said

Look at my sister,
My stepmother said,
She's just burried her husband
And then her father-in-law.

The father-in-law was ninety-five,
You can't blame him for dying,
His son wasn't sixty yet,
Should have lived longer.

And yet, perhaps it's better,
The son dying before the father,
If the son had lived, he'd have asked
Why all the money went to his brothers.

Questions

In his nursing home,
Father kept on asking
The same questions:

How is your son growing up?
Is everything ok with your job?
Is the roof of your house leaking?

I would answer as usual:

Your grandson is a lawyer now and has finished growing;
I am retired and collect a pension just like you;
The roof is fine and should be ok for another twenty years.

Half an hour later
Father asks the same questions
And I repeat my answers.

Then words left him,
First nouns, followed by
Verbs and adjectives.
He still tried to ask
The same questions
With what was left to him:
Personal pronouns.

Sleep Therapy

In the middle of the night,

I move in search of sleep

From the couch to the guest bedroom

From the TV to the IPhone.

After a while, my dog

Leaves her cushion by my bed

And follows me around

Looking worried.

To her, the giver of food and affection

Seems flummoxed by something

As simple as sleep

Which is not a good sign

She shows me

There isn't much to it:

You find something soft on the floor

Turn around twice, plop down, and sigh.

Death

When Mother got very sick
Father gifted me ignorance;
Sister went to Warsaw to say good0by,
Mother tried to kick her out.

She feared people
Would steal her husband;
When he went grocery shopping,
She followed him in her nightgown.

He worried about the winter
In the winter, death came.

The men from the funeral home were drunk
Father drove behind their truck
To make sure they wouldn't loose the coffin
Skidding around icy corners.

He carried everywhere an old shopping bag
With a yellow catalog of German tools;
In between its pages,he kept all the papers
That made the death official.

I thought that, for everything he had gone through
In his life, he at least deserved a decent briefcase.

At the funeral, my sister and I intruded
When the last Jews of Warsaw
Buried of of their own.

It has been thirty years now,
I hardly remember her endearments for him;
His, I hear every time I visit,
Spoken to my stepmother.

Dog Shrink

The dog shrink insisted
On bringing the offending animal with us.

In her office,
She said she hoped
We wouldn't mind
That she would be wearing a ski mask--
Apparently, she was allergic to dogs.

The dog growled at her,
I felt like growling too.

What she told us we already knew:

The dog was old,
The dog had bossed the household her whole life.
The dog won't be able to change now just because there was a new baby around.

We had to choose.

Years later,
That baby younger sister
Told us we should have kept the dog.

My Father

I haven't ever been hungry
As he was in 1929-33.

I haven't ever been cold
As he was in 1941-43.

I haven't ever been shot at
As he was in 1944-45.

I haven't ever been in love
As he was in 1933-83.

Intruder

In a rented beach house,
A lonely bookcase,
With a dusty offering
On crumbly yellow paper:

Reader Digests,
Romances, detective stories,
And 10,000 Jokes for Every Occasion,
Probably acquired at a garage sale.

One newish hardback stands out
In maroon covers, uncomfortably
Rubbing shoulders with her neighbors--
Milosz's "A Treatise on Poetry".

Inconceivable that it was acquired
The complement the collection;
Probably, was left behind by a guest
And missed greatly thereafter.

Taking it wouldn't be theft;
Rather an act of kindness,
Letting her neighbors,
Close their ranks against the intruder.

Bakelite Phone

The black bakelite phone
With a sluggish rotary dial,
Installed in our Warsaw apartment
Made us part of the elite;
Phone lines were scared but
Farther, a retired army officer,
Was entitled to one.

He looked with suspicion
At any use of the phone
That wasn't for emergencies;
He had it placed in the hall,
Making us stand while calling,
To keep the calls short.

My friends dreaded calling me
And getting him on the phone--
He had a habit of
Putting the receiver down
Once he thought he'd heard enough.

One day I saw him
Talking on a phone
While combing his hair
In front of the hall mirror--
He was smiling and I knew
He was talking to a woman
Who wasn't my mother.

Caught in Bed with Her Own Husband

The first time,
They weren't even married yet
And her college roommate walked in on them;
She wanted to hide her face under the blanket for ever,
Having told her roommate quite a few times
That she could do better then the ackward guy
She had nicknamed "Dopey" and was having sex with at the very moment

The second time,
They already had jobs, kids and a house,
And at night, once the kids were down, would collapse senseless,
So they would leave work and meet for lunch and sex in the empty house
And her mother walked in on them
Looking for shears--she was in the neighborhood
And the rosebush she had planted needed to be pruned.

The third time,
He's just had a heart attack;
And feared that the ICU tubes were sucking his life away
and asked her to hold him back;
She lied down and put her arms around him
And a nurse walked in on them and said:
"My, someone must be feeling better now."

Elan Vital

A high school friend,
At a reunion 30 years later,
Brushed aside
His heart condition
And advanced alcoholism
And said with defiance:

"You know,
If I stop taking
My heart medication
And limit liquids
For a day or two
I can still get an erection.

Bucarest, After 17 Years

With some greenery,
Billbords for cell phones and jeans,
And a clear spring day,

The monstrous quarter--
Blocks of flats for Securitate officials
Sourounding the palace on the hill for the Leader--
That Causescu had only half-finished
Before their bullet finished him off,

Doesn't look so bad.

A cause for optimism or pessimism?

438-01

The New Millenium
Finds you in Ashgabat,
And you discover that
The Turkmenbashi--
The Leader of the Turkmen People--
Loves his country.

Which he should
Owing most of it.

To visit, oh say,
The Turkmenbashi Textile Mills,
In Turkmenbashi City,
You get there
On the Turkmenbashi Highway;
And you stay there
At the Turkmenbashi Hotel.

But then a big surprise:
The cell phone company
Is named with the most exuberant eloquence:

"438-01"