Made in Detroit: Poems Read online

  My time in better dresses

  I remember job hunting in my shoddy

  and nervous working class youth,

  how I had to wear nylons and white

  gloves that were dirty in half an hour

  for jobs that barely paid for shoes.

  Don’t put down Jew, my mother

  warned, just say Protestant, it

  doesn’t commit you to anything.

  Ads could still say “white” and

  in my childhood, we weren’t.

  I worked in better dresses in Sam’s

  cut-rate department store, $3.98

  and up. I wasn’t trusted to sell.

  I put boxes together, wrapped,

  cleaned out dressing rooms.

  My girlfriend and I bought a navy

  taffeta dress with cutout top, wore it

  one or the other to parties, till it failed

  my sophistication test. The older

  “girls” in sales, divorced, sleek,

  impressed me, but the man in charge

  I hated, the way his eyes stroked,

  stripped, discarded. How he docked

  our pay for lateness. How he sucked

  on his power like a piece of candy.

  Come fly without me

  A ship in a bottle looks stately

  if arcane and somewhat archaic.

  But two hundred people crammed

  into a flying bottle breathing

  filthy air is disgusting.

  Come stuff your carry-on

  into a mail slot so you can be

  parked on the tarmac for eight

  hours while the toilet overflow

  runs down the aisle. Hungry?

  Buy 10 stale potato chips

  for six dollars. Come ride

  with your knees digging hard

  into your chin. When the guy

  in front leans back, your tray

  will slam your stomach. Fly

  the germy skies inhaling TB.

  The pilots have been awake

  for seventeen hours and can’t

  see the controls.

  The plane was last serviced

  by drunk mechanics who used

  to fix pinball machines. Enjoy

  your delayed overbooked flight

  as the airlines enjoy your money.

  These bills are long unpaid

  To predict disaster, to invoke treachery

  and malice, to spin tales of rotten

  luck to make it not happen:

  that doesn’t work.

  The wind is still rising with hail

  in its teeth. The waves are piling up

  then spilling way, way back baring

  bottom you’ve never seen.

  There’s ashes in the wind, darling,

  a taste of ashes in our food

  ashes on our lips in bed

  eyes blinded with ash.

  There’s a mortgage on my spine

  I cannot pay. Somebody has

  bought my teeth and wants them

  out tomorrow for dice.

  There are real monsters under

  the bed, hungry for blood. They own

  the land this house stands on

  to stripmine for coal.

  Santa isn’t coming. The bounty

  hunter is. There’s a lien on your

  ass and the bank is itchy to fore

  close your future.

  If you’re going to stand, get up.

  If you’re going to fight, get moving.

  Nothing comes to those who wait

  but hunger’s claws

  digging into the soft belly. If you

  value your blood, fight to keep

  it in your veins. You have nothing

  to lose but your life

  and it was sold to them decades

  ago by your parents’ parents.

  Their greed is endless. Your

  patience shouldn’t be.

  Hope is a long, slow thing

  “I became a feminist but I didn’t

  get it all so I have committed to

  the Church of Perpetual Subservience.”

  “I protested, demonstrated but still

  the war went on, so I have realized

  politics is useless and have joined

  The Junior League instead. We have

  marvelous luncheons.” “I made phone

  calls for my candidate but little

  happened so I’ll never vote again.”

  But progress is never individual.

  A wave crashes on our shore, traveling

  all the way from Africa, storming,

  eroding the cliff, grinding it down

  but the same water is not what moved.

  We are droplets in a wave. Maybe

  I cannot with my efforts displace

  a rock but the energy of a movement

  can force it from the way. Look back:

  My great-grandmother was killed

  in a pogrom. My grandmother gave

  birth to eleven children in a tenement

  eating potatoes only sometimes. My

  mother had to leave school in tenth grade

  to work as a chambermaid that salesmen

  chased around dirty beds. Nothing

  changed by itself but was changed by work.

  History records no progress people

  did not sweat and dare to push. A long

  “we” is the power that moves the rock.

  IV

  Working at it

  The late year

  I like Rosh Hashanah late,

  when the leaves are half burnt

  umber and scarlet, when sunset

  marks the horizon with slow fire

  and the black silhouettes

  of migrating birds perch

  on the wires davening.

  I like Rosh Hashanah late

  when all living are counting

  their days toward death

  or sleep or the putting by

  of what will sustain them—

  when the cold whose tendrils

  translucent as a jellyfish

  and with a hidden sting

  just brush our faces

  at twilight. The threat

  of frost, a premonition,

  a warning, a whisper

  whose words we cannot

  yet decipher, but will.

  I repent better in the waning

  season when the blood

  runs swiftly and all creatures

  look keenly about them

  for quickening danger.

  Then I study the rock face

  of my life, its granite pitted

  and pocked and pickaxed,

  eroded, discolored by sun

  and wind and rain—

  my rock emerging

  from the veil of greenery

  to be mapped, to be

  examined, to be judged.

  Erev New Years

  This is my real new year’s eve,

  not that mishmash of desperate

  parties with somebody puking

  on your shoes or passing out,

  that night when amateur drunks

  crash into telephone poles

  or other drivers. Here I make

  my real resolutions as I toss

  breadcrumbs into the Herring

  River as it pours into Wellfleet

  Bay. I try, but some sins,

  some failures I toss year after

  year and still they lurk in me.

  Every Rosh Hashanah I swear

  to be less impatient, then fail,

  but next year, fresh and sweet

  marked with honey and apples,

  surely I will correct myself.

  My year opens its bronze doors

  and I pass through into whatever

  the Book holds and whatever

  I make or unmake or pass by.

  I walk int
o this new beginning

  of a self still under construction.

  Head of the year

  Head of the year and time to use

  our heads: to think deeply without

  subterfuge, without excuses—flaking

  them off the worn bones of last

  year’s resolutions.

  How pitiful they look now, remnants

  of kavanah more like rags than

  the skeletal foundation on which

  we planned to build our forceful

  and gracious new year.

  Every Rosh Hashanah I make

  some of the same resolves. Where

  does that energy leak off to? Are

  they just perfunctory gestures

  at this new year?

  Which resolves did I start carrying

  out fresh and eager and then let

  slide? Which were real only on

  paper, Potemkin villages of the mind,

  never made new—

  nice facades I didn’t truly mean to

  inhabit. Tomorrow as I do tashlich

  let me make no paper promises

  but carry these resolves into action

  in this still sweet new year.

  May the new year continue our joy

  Apples and honey for the new year

  but you are my year round sweet

  apple. The apple of my eye, apple

  of temptation and delight. My honey:

  our lives together are full of work,

  harvest from dirt and sweat, bounty

  of work from the brain and the heart,

  we’re each other’s wages and prize:

  the seeds in every apple, the flower

  and the pollen and the nectar

  and the final ultimate honey

  our bodies make and surrender.

  I was never truly happy before you.

  I was never truly whole before you.

  Late that afternoon they come

  At Yizkor my dead swim around me

  schools of them flashing, then

  slowly as one by one I honor them.

  Mother, brother, bobbah, aunts,

  uncles, cousins, I am here to say

  one by one silently their names.

  Friends of all the times of my life,

  those who left young, those whom

  death took after illness ravaged them;

  those whose names shine for all,

  those who lived hidden by poverty,

  those whom you might call ordinary

  but not to those who loved them.

  My cats come too, even if you

  believe they lack souls. All those

  I’ve loved and cherished circle

  in the fading light of Yizkor and I

  pray, blessed be their memories.

  As long as I live let me pause to

  remember, let me pay them a prayer

  placed like a stone on their graves.

  N’eilah

  The hinge of the year

  the great gates opening

  and then slowly slowly

  closing on us.

  I always imagine those gates

  hanging over the ocean

  fiery over the stone grey

  waters of evening.

  We cast what we must

  change about ourselves

  onto the waters flowing

  to the sea. The sins,

  errors, bad habits, whatever

  you call them, dissolve.

  When I was little I cried

  out I! I! I! I want I want.

  Older, I feel less important,

  a worker bee in the hive

  of history, miles of hard

  labor to make my sweetness.

  The gates are closing

  The light is failing

  I kneel before what I love

  imploring that it may live.

  So much breaks, wears

  down, fails in us. We must

  forgive our failed promises—

  their broken glass in our hands.

  The wall of cold descends

  Near the end of our annual solstice party

  as guests were rummaging through the pile

  for their coats and hugging many goodbyes

  the very first snow of the year began

  to eddy down in big flat flakes.

  It was cold enough to stick, with the grass

  poking through and then buried.

  Now the ground gives it back

  under the low ruddy sun that sits

  on the boughs of the pine like a fox

  if red foxes could climb. The cats

  crowd the windows for its touch.

  The Wolf Moon seemed bigger than

  the sun, almost brighter as last night

  it turned the snow ghostly.

  Now it too wanes. The nub end

  of the year when all northern

  cultures celebrate fire and light.

  Tonight we’ll take the first two candles

  to kindle one from the other.

  When we go out after dark, our

  eyes seek lights that bore holes

  in the thick black like the pelt

  of a huge hairy monster, a grizzly

  who devours the warm-blooded.

  We are kin with the birds who huddle

  in evergreens, who crowd feeders,

  kin with the foxes and their prey, kin

  with all who shiver this night, home-

  less or housed, clutching or alone

  under the vast high dome of night.

  How she learned

  A friend was an only child, she thought,

  until sorting through her mother’s things

  after the frail old woman died—who

  had borne Anna late in life, a miracle,

  a blessing, she was always told—

  Anna found a greying photograph.

  Her aunt who escaped Poland

  in ’37 had saved and given it

  to her younger sister who barely

  survived Nordhausen working inside

  the mountain, skinny almost-ghost.

  Anna recognized her mother, decades

  younger, but against her side was

  pressed a girl not Anna. Scrawled

  on the back, Feygelah und Perl.

  Who was Feygelah? Her aunt bore

  only sons. This girl was four or five

  with long light braids, her legs

  locked together in a shy fit. Who?

  There were letters back and forth,

  Boston to Krakow. She sat reading

  them, puzzling out the handwriting,

  the Yiddish. She had a dictionary

  but even then, it took her late into

  the evening. Anna had a sister.

  A sister vanished into smoke.

  A sister torn from her mother,

  murdered, burnt. Anna sat numb.

  She was the replacement for

  a girl whose name her mother

  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.

  Working at it

  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 order of the seder

  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: