“To be no one’s sleep under so many petals.”
—Rilke
I
The memories amble in, don’t they, Molly,
like the old muzzled bear the Pole
brought on a leash to your village in Zhitomir
to wrestle with the drunken Russian soldiers
then dance for rubles to the accordion and violin.
While the balalaika played, they poked him with sticks,
tossed coals from the fire, and cigarettes at him
that caught in his fur and smoked and glittered.
You imagined him dreaming his mother’s warm, feral milk,
the nuzzle of fur, as she pulled
the pine needles and leaves over both of them
like a second skin in the hollows of their cave
under the snow in the old growth forest.
Luckshenkup they called you,
the noodle headed dreamer.
In the Pale of Settlement
the Luftmenschen, lived off the air,
A soup made from small change,
throwaway bones, two onions, two potatoes,
shav and wild greens picked by the banks of the Teterev.
A soup thin enough to read a newspaper through.
After Csar Nicholas was assassinated
the Novoye Vremya headlined: “To Beat
Or Not To Beat Jews?” Is it really a question?
They were clutchers, pickers, sellers.
Buy it for a ruble, sell it for a ruble and a half,
pins, needles, paper, string.
Stand on your toes to reach God’s ear,
beyond the Pale of Settlement.
Even at eleven, Molly, I wasn’t too old
to lie across your lap as you scratched my back
and told me stories about Zhitomir and the pottery.
At eleven you are trimming on the kick wheel,
imitation gold edges on bone-white plates,
auguries that spin between your knees
that you stare at unblinking—
a ring around the man in the moon.
a face in a bone-colored mirror trimmed in gold,
Will you take her to the Goldineh Medina.
The Golden Promised Land, Mr. Man in the Moon?
Max, your brother, with a bandana over his nose.
has been mixing the clay since he was ten,
the iron oxides, feldspar, kaolin, lead, sand, grog,
powdering the flowers of his lungs.
Pull the bandana over your nose, tie it tighter, Max.
Who knew from dust and fumes in those days?
Max, the Ladies’ man. Max, the dancer,
the dresser. In his fancy vests, and slicked back hair,
Max who never saved his nickels and dimes
to bring anyone else over.
He’ll be dead before he’s thirty.
little Max, the ladies’ man
Mad as a hatter.
Six years from now, you will treadle
another kind of wheel in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory,
But now all the children dig clay at the river.
You make dolls that you’ll fire in the kiln.
Bible figures you name that come alive in your hand,
Esther, Sarai, Susana, Rose of Sharon.
Eins, tsvey, drei, fir…
You march a a clay golem across the wedging table.
On cold nights, you rub your back against the brick kiln
then sweep the shop floor waiting for the load to cool,
to chip the teats off the fired cups and plates.
You pull out the window brick, to peer inside:
whispers of orange and yellow winds,
a boat rocks on waves of fire. A shooting star.
the silhouette of a tiny figure— A golem? An angel?
dancing on the horizon between earth and heaven
shot through with prisms of red and gold.
always the lukshenkup,
the noodle headed dreamer.
If you had the second sight back then
you wouldn’t see golems and angels.
You would not be talking to the man in the moon.
You would see fire falling from the sky,
people of the air like shooting stars.
Your friends Gussie Rosenthal and May Caliandro Levanti.
on the ninth floor ledge of the Triangle Shirt waist factory.
Flames lick out from the window to catch Sara Brenman’s hair.
The firemen’s ladders only reach the seventh floor
The eighth floor—Wait Sara they are coming to get you.
She jumps toward the fireman, her hair on fire,
But the fireman on the ladder reaching, reaching,
can’t hold her, can’t catch her.
He nearly falls as she bounces off of him.
Her skirts and white underclothes blossom over her head,
a lead filled rag doll screaming.
The blankets and nets are useless, the falling bodies
rip them from the firemen’s hands.
When Sarah’s body strikes the ground
her heart explodes.
Dead weight.
Izzy Gould is dropping those too afraid to jump,
holding them over the ledge by their wrists,
face to face–Yiz gdail y yiz gadash…
Mary Levanthal and Antonina Coletti embrace each other
and jump.
The cones that tell the temperature and augur the final glaze
melt at two thousand degrees,
to signal the end of the firing.
We shouldn’t stare into the kiln too long, Molly.
We’ll hurt our eyes.
It’s like staring at the sun.
________________________________________________
Luftmenschen: people of the air
Golem: In Jewish mythology, a creature fashioned from clay, animated with special prayers to do the bidding of the person who created it.
Gussie Rosenthal, May Caliandro Levanti, Mary Levanthal, Antonina Coletti, Sara Brenmen: five of the one hundred and fifty six men and women who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
Yiz gdail y yiz gadash…: Beginning of the Kadish, the prayer for the dead.
IV
In the murmur of closed air, in steerage,
in the rocking lap of The SS Penland,
by the engines that labor and groan
in the trembling of shadow pools and pressed nights,
a concertina, a calloused fiddle, and a mouth organ, recall
“Rozhinkes Mit Mandlin,”
Raisens with almonds.
In patched carpet bags, in burlap sacks,
in hearts trussed with twine and old rope,
in valises stuffed with stale bread, hard, long-shots,
posed sepia memories in stiff borrowed clothes,
in hidden pockets of old great coats,
clutchers of lean bones,
clutchers of thin straws and last hopes,
reluctant lovers of leaving,
the Luftmenschen bear their remnants and last chances.
as they squeeze toward the portholes
to bath their faces in the North Sea air
in the second winds of morning.
Molly is on her toes –Ich vil zayen–
lift me to see. On thick corderoy shoulders,
she watches through a sunrise porthole
a pantomime of lumbering golems
billowed riders on twisted horses
knotted, puffed, like fresh-risen chala.
There! Carrying a candle,
a flying fish with the head of an angel
in folds of darkness and emerging light.
lnverted heads linger over translucent torsos,
shot through with prisms of rose and gold,
toys of remembering, over a green kimono sea.
V
In Japan the money runs out.
The rubles that Moma kept in her gotkas
are worth less than toilet paper.
Molly, Max, and her mother, walk the streets.
Dora sews and cleans for the Europeans.
They lived with the doll people,
butter skinned with the voices of birds.
They drink green bitter tea from tiny cups
No lumps of sugar to put between their teeth.
Small hands touch a freckled arm.
Keiko giggles and brushes out Molly’s auburn hair
To twist and pile it on her head.
Molly smiles the Rose of Sharon.
It takes thirty men running to get the big kite off the ground.
They are fishing in the speckled, blue waters of Heaven,
where the clouds are lotus blossoms, here
on the other side of the world.
They are letting the big golden one,
the king of the carp run, hoping
he won’t sound and get away.
they are taming bulls, and wild white horses.
They are chasing turtles, cranes and dragons.
The Buddhist priests augur the future,
if the baby will be a boy or girl
by reading the kite’s direction and the turtle’s smile.
Smaller fighting kites dart and chase each other.
The losers flutter, and tumble in a confusion
of splintered bamboo, torn, painted silk,
sparrow bones and colored paper,
a long, spiraling disarray.
When a child is born, we fly a kite, Keiko tells Molly.
to welcome the souls of children.
A bare-chested man pulls on one of the lines.
A mustached red-eyed dragon and a chrysanthemum
glisten red and blue, trembling on his back.
He beckons Molly with a toss of his head,
to hold the rope with him between the other men.
Follow the tattooed man’s gold-toothed smile
upward Molly, up the line, there—
A box kite bigger than the old synagogue in Zhitomir
floating in the sky in the shape of golden carp
that struggles against the line
He will swim against the currents upstream.
You can hear the great bamboo struts creak and strain.
________________
Gotkas: underwear
VIII
I have a secret, I can tell you
now that we are alone here
and I am a grown man in my forties.
You are the woman in the painting
A Double Portrait With A Glass Of Wine,
wearing the grey dress, Molly
with the slit up the right front leg,
plum-colored stockings, a necklace of raisins and almonds
the bodice is undone, loose and laughing,
a crescent moon in the creamy clouds,
breasts of Susana and the Rose of Sharon,
You are dancing with me on your shoulders,
Hossana, Hossana ,Oh Susana, I sing
in my thick, greenhorn accent.
As we laugh.
I hold up a glass of ginger ale and cherry Kiafa.
Is that a jester’s cap I’m wearing,
or my love for you, dressed up in purple,
descending in an emerald cloud?
I sit astride your broad bare shoulders,
one hand over your right eye as you dance.
What are you holding in your hands,
Playing cards, tickets to Coney Island, a bouquet of feathers?
You smile, almost bursting
as the laughter lifts us off the ground.
Our heads turn upside down
Your eyes are open, my eyes are closed
as we curve into each other
in the folds of colors inside of colors,
fields of yellows, rough ochres and mustard.
we are high over Zhitomir
then back in the kitchen,
for the kiss.
X
They say the sense of hearing
is the first to come and the last to go.
Can you hear me Molly, I whisper in your ear.
Let me tell you a story, this time.
You are back on the streets of Zhitomir.
I have set right your father’s cart on the cobbled stones.
The Black Hundreds have disappeared.
I brush off your dress and buy you fresh baked chala.
Here, take this baked potato, this hard-boiled egg
to warm your hands, on your way to the pottery.
Tonight you will have all chicken you can eat,
not the neck or rear end once a month,
The Pope’s nose, your father calls it
under his breath, but a breast and a leg,
like the men in the family used to get.
Lie across my lap and I’ll scratch your back,
the way you scratched mine when I was little.
We’ll play the game where we trace letters and words
in Yiddish on each others’ back to guess them.
Hurray, Hurray, di Buba gelait ayn ey.
Fa vus fa vus, zi hut a langa nuz
I will blow air in the palm of your hand,
tickle it lightly, then the little mouse
will run up your arm and you will laugh.
Mizela maizela mizela maisela.
Sit at my feet and I’ll undo your braids
and take out the tortoise shell combs.
I’ll brush your hair down,
trace the pale veins on your neck and temple
under your porcelain skin
as the doll people loved to do.
I want you in the gray silk dress
slit up the side with the plum stockings
A necklace of raisins and almonds.
I’ll carry you on my shoulders to the sunset porthole
and then up onto the deck,
out of the closed air, and steerage
out of the rocking of shadow pools,
the pressed nights’ murmur.
I’ll fly you like a kite
into the second winds of morning
above a green kimono sea.
I want to feel the tug and pull on the line,
then release the string and float you into the billows.
_________________________
“Hurray, Hurray …a langa nuz”: a children’s rhyme: Hurray,Hurray, the grandmother laid and egg.Why, why? Because she has a long nose.
Mizela Maisela: mousey, mousey, little mousey
XI
Now Molly, one last Buba Meisa,
a story, like the ones you used to tell me.
The Great Bear is asleep,
hibernating tonight in the folds and hollows of space,
a black hole in some far off region
of his old growth forest.
In the thickness of his blackberry dreams such time passes,
ten thousand years with every long breath.
The belt of the hunter frays
and the constellations drift a little more apart
The great bear smells honey in the hollow tree,
like the one you and Max hid in from the Cossacks
that night coming home from the pottery
in the woods, outside of Zhitomir.
The bear dreams of his mother,
way behind the sun.
He is yawning, waking,
sliver flashes ripple down his back.
as he rubs his side against the rings of Saturn,
licks the mist off the Milky Way
and drinks from the river of shining milk.
He unravels and numbers our days,
moves the drifting planets back into their places.
He is light years beyond the hunters and watchers
with their useless snares and nooses
their night scopes and listening machines.
They will never again see him face to face.
He approaches through the firmament
in his slow and rolling gait,
yes, unmuzzled, and unchained,
claws longer than the Big Dipper,
stars, like night-blooming jasmine hanging in his fur.
He shakes off the blackberry dreams of night
and reaches for the honey covered sun.
He rises on his hind legs, lumbering,
no balalaikas, no concertinas,
no Pole and drunken Russian soldiers poke him with sticks.
Listen Molly, under the rose petals of your sleep.
press your face against the window.
The hokey pokey man is calling your name.
the hurdy gurdy is playing “Rozhinkes mit Mandlin,”
And the bear begins to dance.
____________________
the rivers of shining milk: Octavio Paz