The Bookstore

IN THE BULLPEN AT DANA FARBER

Waiting in the pen at
Dana Farber, a fly ball from
Fenway, getting ready for his turn
at the Green Monster, he tells me
unprompted
of the woman to whom
he was wed for 70 years.

How she made a home to which
he looked forward to returning,
which he no longer calls home.
How she wanted so badly to make it
to their youngest daughter’s wedding.
How she succeeded.
How she slipped away the day after.

Accompanied by his adult daughter,
who squeezes his arm as though
he were a pump and her hand a blood-pressure cuff,
he tells me of his mother who
raised six children
after his father died, too young.

Cleaning his thin-framed glasses which
have become streaked,
and weaving his fingers through his daughter’s,
he tells me of the parachute which
saved his life when he was shot down
over Australia, and how,
at war’s end, he returned home with that silk
from which his wife made a baptismal gown for his
children and their children,
as his daughter extricates her hand from his
and cleans her now streaked glasses.

And, somehow, the subject
of his advanced pancreatic cancer
never comes up before he is
called to swing for the fences.

EXODUS

Thanks to the wonders of chemotherapy,
my hair is leaving my scalp
first, in small familial strands
then, en masse.
The way whites fled Queens
for the island of Long.
The way Jews fled Egypt and Russia
and then Bushwick and Bensonhurst.

What once rested on my head,
between skull and skull cap,
now rests in my shower drain
resembling nothing so much
as a drowned vole,
mocking my vanity and array
of hair care products.

Perhaps, like those of my tribe,
my hair will change its name,
get a dye job and migrate
strand by strand
to a new promised land.

Or, perhaps, after a period of desolation
and abandoned landscapes,
marked by depreciating values,
it will return
finer and thinner than before.
Just look at Williamsburg.

On the Yahrzeit of Ezra Pound

I cannot bring myself to light a candle
for the bastard, as brilliant as he was and,
besides, he would not want my
circumcised prayers in that guttural tongue.

Do his goose-stepping friends deserve a Kaddish?
Perhaps Eichmann merits a novena over his ashes
forever enshrined in the cool Mediterranean.

After all, the butchers are in need of prayers
far more than the butchered. The souls of incinerated
children do not require our intercession. Once baked,
they will pass nicely from ovens into paradise,
bypassing poets fluent in Greek.

Or would the words halt en route after
they had passed over my diseased Kike tongue
and decline to go farther, refusing a direct order
unlike a good German.

No, this is the best revenge.
I will squeeze them out
like a kidney stone. He would have hated the
sanctimonious forgiveness of it.
Confutatis maledictis,
Flammis acribus addictis.
Voca te cum benedictis.
Yisgadal, v’yiskadash