Home, for a time, now at healing,

Amid ?owering lemon, feathery eucalyptus,
The improbable richness of California winter,
In this house of women without men

She practices the patient arts,

Reading the memoirs of Mandelstam?s widow,

Talking on the telephone to concerned distant voices,
Sewing a pearl button on her favorite nightgown.
Just yesterday, propped at the window, she wrote:

I feel slowly my being drift out my ?ngertips,
The miracle of my transplanted life,

Yellow roses in the blue venetian vase

D. brought me from Murano

hanging over it, quite by chance,

The black madonna of Czenstochow .. .

Early this morning she wakes to cowbells in Switzerland.

Out the white world, the fog world,

A shape drifts toward her?Anna, the beekeeper?s daughter,

In her pale veil, long white gloves.

How slowly she moves down the winding path
Gathering in her arms one by one

The honeyed light from darkening hives.

 

Beyond her, winter stars glimmer?ports of call.

The Wrestler

 

Richard 5. Chess

When that stinking angel Ed, the smartest boy
in Violet shorts, lifted and dropped
me to the mat, when that slob landed
on me, I went deaf to the skinny birds
who ringed the mat with jeers,
heard only my breath escaping.
For a dizzy moment I confused him
with One of the dumbbell-tough thugs
who ?icks his ashes at girlish boys,
but then I flipped onto my safe belly
and rose, ass ?rst, to shake this nuisance
from my back.
He dropped me by the thighs this time
and worked my shoulder blades
toward the ?oor. No prayer could save me.
On the count of three Ed rose
like vapor and vanished down a dark corridor
toward some book, no doubt,
leaving me, the blessed son of Isaac,
crushed on the matted earth
from which my children have risen
to take revenge.

Anger

 

Caroline Pz'nkelstez'zz

Selina, a child not a child not a child but a Jew,
goes to the store for milk. This is Lodz
where rumor has the chickens plotting . . .

In their necklaces of lice the chickens sway
and gabhle at their prayers as if . ..
as if the holy Sabbath were a barnyard!

Soon. Soon. This is Lodz the dogs will eat.

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