Made in Detroit: Poems Read online

  we must touch each base

  of the haggadah as we pass,

  blessing, handwashing,

  dipping this and that. Voices

  half harmonize on the brukhahs.

  Dear faces like a multitude

  of moons hang over the table

  and the truest brief blessing:

  affection and peace that we make.

  The two cities

  L’shanah haba’ah b’Yerushalayim

  we say every Pesach, concluding

  the haggadah. Some say it piously,

  some with pride, some almost

  embarrassed, some with mixed

  feelings, some balk at the words.

  In the murderous times that came

  down so often in the Diaspora,

  it was said with fervent hope

  that some where, some time

  we could, would belong, be

  free. But Jerusalem, the golden,

  the city on the hill, is two

  cities, one blood-soaked, fought

  over for millennia, again, again.

  The other is a city of the mind.

  Utopia comes as a walled garden

  or as a city, a community of peace

  we have never reached, where

  justice and equality are daily

  as water and still as precious.

  May we always travel onward

  toward that good place even

  if like Moses we never arrive

  struggling through dust and blood

  to unite the two Jerusalems

  in one shining city of peace.

  Where silence waits

  How hard it is to keep Shabbat,

  to stop what crams days, evenings

  like a hoarder’s house and to thrust

  every worry, duty, command,

  every list of What Is To Be Done

  into a mental closet and bolt

  that door. We feel half guilty

  not to be multitasking.

  Surely this space we eke out

  is indulgence. Where’s

  the end product? How can we

  walk into silence like a pond?

  The computer, the smart phone,

  the fax machine summon us

  to attend to shrill voices. How

  can we justify being idle?

  How can we listen to that voice

  that issues only from deep

  stillness and silence? How

  can we ever afford not to?

  I say Kaddish but still mourn

  Tonight I light the first skinny candles

  of celebration and the single fat

  candle of grieving, for this first

  night is my mother’s yahrzeit too.

  I say Kaddish that never mentions

  death but in me is a hole that never

  quite healed over, that sweet lonely

  scar of missing that goes on

  year after year singing its husky

  lament for a tattered life, for lone-

  liness inside an asbestos bungalow

  where she cleaned and cleaned

  and cleaned what could never

  be clean, in the fog of acid

  and smoke from the factories.

  All that was white yellowed.

  All that was right passed away.

  All that had been soft hardened

  to shards of shattered hopes.

  All that was promised her, lied.

  Yet in that asbestos almost

  prison, she delighted in sweets,

  in baking what she wanted to eat.

  She gobbled books whole,

  she held sway over the neighbor

  women reading their palms.

  Gossip quieted her pain. Others

  suffer too, she said. Amein.

  V

  That was Cobb Farm

  Little diurnal tragedies

  Mercy for the wren baby pushed

  from the nest by the bigger hatchling—

  egg the cowbird deposited.

  Mercy for the green turtles caught

  in the sudden cold of the bay

  when the nor’easter blows.

  Mercy for the pregnant cat thrown

  out to starve, nursing her five kittens

  among garbage and broken glass.

  Mercy for the geese the golfers

  want poisoned because they disturb

  the green beside already polluted pools.

  Mercy for the birds trying to fly

  south on ancient routes, blinded

  by our lights, dying on skyscrapers.

  All around us are creatures we barely

  notice, trying to preserve their only

  lives among our machinery,

  among our smog and smoke, inside

  our radiation, among the houses and

  roads built on their once habitats.

  The next evolutionary step

  In the Herring River, the mummichog

  lives along with eels, alewives, green

  and bullfrogs, snapping turtles

  and muskrats. Of all these

  the mummichog is the smallest

  but the hardiest. It can withstand

  heat and cold. Polluted waters

  do not sicken it. It survives most

  poisons and is predicted to outlive

  us all in nuclear disaster.

  It schools with hundreds of kin

  who move as one through muddy

  waters, feeling their way. On

  the full moon it releases its eggs

  and on the new moon too making

  sure there will always be multitudes

  of mummichogs. I, who am far

  less sure of my survival, salute

  you, for in spite of all we do to

  destroy, you’ll repopulate earth.

  That was Cobb Farm

  When I drive around my village

  poking through half the buildings

  are what they used to be: the upscale

  gallery I never enter was the post office.

  On busy mornings in summer what

  car acrobatics were required to pick

  up the mail, the parking ample

  enough in the winter, now jammed.

  The gas station that’s turned into pizza;

  the restaurant that failed five

  different owners and now stands

  vacant, its most recent sign fading

  to GNR ATO, a warning perhaps

  to future entrepreneurs. The fire

  station now sells leather clothing

  from May to October. Houses

  from which friends were rushed

  to the hospital to die or brought

  back home to do it in peace.

  The field where the white horse

  Ajax browsed. Once in a thunder

  storm, he climbed onto my porch

  and stuck his head in the window.

  Stood there awhile and then walked

  slowly down the drive and away.

  The candle factory became the library.

  The farm was cut into development lots.

  A hurricane brought down a forest

  like skinny dominoes, now a field.

  The wrecked boat’s bones no longer

  protrude at low tide. Millionaires’

  summer houses fell over the cliff.

  Used to be, used to—my head crammed

  with useless memories: an attic in

  a house someone buys, wondering

  why the owner kept all that old junk.

  They meet

  Lava from an island volcano

  plunges into the sea. Vermilion

  and black landscape by day,

  at night the white torrents

  resemble television reports

  of rush hour traffic.

  Where water and fire

  collide, a column of smoke

 
; and steam gushes upward,

  water boiling as the lava

  did. Nothing living could

  survive this fusion.

  How it roars as it meets

  the water. This is a tropical

  sea, not cold but lava

  is boiling rock, magma

  melting all it touches

  till water snuffs it.

  Now it turns back to rock.

  Excitement. Smoking.

  Irresistible fire consuming

  all in its path. Till abruptly

  it’s doused and returns

  to a previous state.

  So it goes sometimes

  with lovers.

  A cigarette left smoldering

  Walking through the luminous rain

  sliding down her bare arms as if

  the city wept, she dreamed instead

  of fire, drops of it small as beetles.

  I could walk through fire, she

  thought, but she was wrong. Her

  summer dress went up in a single

  torch and she screamed

  like something torn. I see her face

  still, sometimes when I think I am

  falling asleep and then don’t,

  her mouth a perfect circle.

  We die different ways. We beg

  to go painlessly as rain falling.

  Discovery motion

  The kitten from the shelter hasn’t

  learned her name Xena yet. But how

  wonderful that leap: those nonmeows

  humans utter mean something.

  When I mention her name, Puck

  turns his head and looks at her.

  He has grasped that noises belong

  to beings and objects and actions:

  out, chicken, no, come, sit. How

  does a creature without language

  suddenly put that attachment to-

  gether? Human babies preprogrammed

  to stare at faces, still take a while.

  They babble long before they speak.

  Then there’s the long learning process

  that words are not the thing,

  that promises only shape air, that

  cries of passion are nonnegotiable,

  that we walk through our days

  followed by biting swarms of lies.

  Sun in January

  An icy wind down from Quebec

  freezes the homeless teenager

  sleeping in a carton under

  the rumble of a highway bridge.

  Walking in High Toss, I find

  the corpse of a dog some

  hunter shot. By accident?

  In anger? For sport? To

  the dog, why would that

  matter, the paws outstretched

  as if to beg, head chin down

  between them, flies swarming.

  A friend is back in chemo.

  All food tastes like metal,

  she says. I have no appetite.

  It’s the third time of poison.

  Today the whole world shines

  as if someone polished every

  single twig. The air is vanilla

  ice cream. We are warm together.

  So much can go wrong

  we are almost afraid to be happy.

  Little rabbit’s dream song

  I will be safe in the grass.

  I will be as safe as I was

  when my mother cuddled me

  in the high grass.

  I will have plenty to eat.

  I will have not only the wild

  grasses and tender fruit

  but carrots and cabbage.

  No dog will see me, no

  coywolf, no prowling cat.

  No hawk will spy me

  from a dot in the sky.

  I will be safe and full.

  I will be warm as when

  my mother cuddled me

  content in the high grass.

  Let it be so, let it be

  so, let it be so all

  the sun and into the dark

  when the coywolves howl.

  Different voices, one sentence

  I love you in one voice is an arrival,

  in another a curse. It can be a wall

  imprisoning. Or a door opening

  to who knows what pain or joy.

  When it’s spoken sometimes

  the listener flinches, wants to

  force it back into the mouth

  that dropped it like a net.

  Sometimes it has been waited

  for so long it has lost its juice

  wizened now, a winter potato

  in the bottom of the sack.

  Sometimes we fall into it

  willing to take what we can get.

  Cotton’s wife

  She knows she is right at breakfast,

  the correct cereal with fatless milk.

  Afterward she runs herself gaunt.

  I weigh less at forty than at fourteen,

  she confides to just about everyone.

  In the mirror an aura of sanctity.

  Her husband will not love her

  if she is not perfect, flat, hard

  as a landing strip. His disapproval

  frosts their bed and her blood.

  He is the voice of the Puritan

  father. He channels Cotton Mather

  and dreams of burning native villages

  full of naked sinners, of hanging

  uppity women who mutter charms.

  She reads the fine print on every

  bottle, in every manual. Her

  mattresses still sport their tags.

  Life is a marathon that keeps

  getting longer. Her nipples bleed.

  The Puritan’s wife becomes a pillar

  of rock, an obelisk pointing toward

  the cold grey sky—a monument

  commemorating a girl who tried

  to grow into a woman but was pruned.

  That summer day

  The morning of the day you died

  the birds were singing backup

  to a huge red sun

  marching out of the green marsh.

  Later as your breath was rasping

  that sun now fiery white

  beat on the blue gong of the sky

  and the birds were silent.

  The squash blossoms were opening

  to warmth. A bumblebee zizzed

  its way through the garden. A striped

  caterpillar mounted the dill.

  A robin ate it in two gulps. Later

  a ruddy fox looked at me from

  under the pitch pines, eyeing

  the tabby in the window.

  Everybody went about their daily

  round, chasing and being chased,

  flying, trotting, eating, eaten while

  you were slowly swallowed

  and we wept.

  Insomniac prayer at 2 a.m.

  Sleep winds around me like a coy

  snake, touching, squeezing, feinting

  withdrawing. Tedious foreplay

  never arriving at the act itself.

  Or the absence of act: that place

  I can let go of the day and allow

  problems to fall like a tray of dishes

  breaking, except that in the morning

  every problem is seamlessly intact.

  I’m a tightrope walker who longs

  to let go, to dive into that sweet fog

  below. Rise up, fog, and engulf me,

  melt me into you. Let me cease

  all the brain and body’s muttering,

  the discontents of organ and joint.

  Let me be Nobody—no body, no

  mind nattering, no ambitions,

  losses, bills, projects, obligations:

  let nothing fill me like a deserted hall

  where words no longer resonate.

  I want to be emptied out, a purse

&
nbsp; dumped on the table. Sleep, you

  are the only room I long to enter

  that moon of white silence.

  The body in the hot tub

  The day was planned, birthday

  of two friends, Indian food.

  They had secured the ingredients

  mail order two weeks before.

  The day was preordered, time

  to make the mango chutney, time

  to wash the rice, to pound spices

  in the mortar, soak chickpeas.

  The police pounded on the door

  at six a.m., sent the couple

  and their dog into exile from

  a crime scene: a nude woman

  facedown in their tenant’s

  hot tub. No, they had heard

  nothing. The dog had not barked,