I Watched You Disappear Read online

  this relic of summer, but he’s much too slow,

  stumbling and falling in the ancient gulch,

  as the dog lurches after him, trackless in the dust.

  Borscht

  Not the thin red broth that shares its name—

  this was Ukrainian borscht, dense as a thicket

  with cabbage, beets, and boiled beef.

  A spoonful returned my father to the scraggly

  outskirts of Kharkov, the bed by the oven,

  picnics in the wood. His was a brief boyhood,

  playing knight in the graveyard (razed

  by the Red Army) that housed a Cossack poet.

  Borscht, a heel of seedy black bread, a shot

  of vodka, and he’d begin to sing folksongs

  of rivers, birches, and long-dead heroes,

  the songs he’d heard at his father’s table.

  But when I whistled Edith Piaf, he spat,

  French slut, to sing of love while men lay dying.

  And we each ate silently from our bowls.

  The Overcoat

  The Russian professor has lost his overcoat.

  Somebody snatched it—

  somebody’s hands grasped his collar.

  Without its wool, no room is warm enough.

  Somebody tore from his back the weft

  of eighty years, the tight stitching

  of the Masters whose words he’s forgotten.

  Alyosha? Or Andrei? Something with an A.

  Now, despite the cold, he sweats.

  Somebody left him in the empty square

  in a t-shirt, track pants, and thinning socks.

  His gesturing hands rub his forehead,

  scrape vanilla ice cream from a dish.

  Coward, traitor. Somebody takes and takes.

  My Father in Vienna, 1958

  He criss-crossed occupation zones,

  pretending to be Czech, a story rehearsed

  for train conductors and border check points.

  The war hadn’t ended. He distributed leaflets.

  Bolsheviks had burned his father to death.

  The Americans with whom he worked jailed him

  when Molotov visited the city, afraid

  of what those refugees from the mustached

  lunatic might do—but he studied, too,

  came to the conclusion that God exists.

  He spent his poor income on the best suits,

  custom-made wool for his tall frame,

  so the Viennese wouldn’t scorn him.

  From their stone niches, apostles watched

  as he traveled those bomb-blackened, black-

  market streets with his forged papers,

  a good man in a fallen city.

  Their sandstone eyes blessed him through

  the hands of spies, the informing landlady,

  immigration officials and hiring committees.

  They blessed him through loan officers, doctors,

  deans; through the raising of two daughters;

  through years of lectures, cancer, and nervous

  breakdowns.

  They blessed him all the way here,

  Harlee Manor, where I sign the guest book

  at the front office, hand my driver’s license

  to the clerk on duty, and carry my box of chocolates

  and papers to Room #101, my father’s.

  Whose hands is he in now? Who will shave him

  and help him to his walker? Who will button

  his pajamas after he’s slipped in the first arm,

  then the second, nodding his head in thanks?

  Sorting Peaches

  They tumble through the gate, fresh-picked,

  still wearing the orchard on their skins.

  Not one is perfect. Flame-colored,

  amber-lobed, soft as a cat’s chin,

  they rattle down the line, ringing.

  Hands catch and sort them,

  wrap them in tissue,

  drop them into sacks or crates.

  They’re attar of summer,

  their hearts both stone and seed.

  And what a gift to palm that globe,

  that little world fashioned of sun,

  flesh, honeyed veins, napped cheeks.

  Each fruit a fulfillment, a weight

  you welcome, sister, of earth,

  cloud, heat, and sweet mystery.

  for Claudia Krugovoy

  On Our Anniversary

  The Quaker Meetinghouse in which we wed

  was shabby—its carpet faded Wedgwood blue,

  no festive flowers in a vase, or ribboned pews.

  But I loved the butter-yellow stucco walls,

  and the little graveyard at the back, ivy-grown,

  where only the tops of squat square stones shown

  gray above the vines. Beneath the eaves, we held

  for view our newly golden fingers.

  We knew a great thing had been done.

  We were to be each other’s rune and grail,

  trunk and totem, handkerchief and spoon.

  Forsaking sex with all others, refusing

  escape alone from trouble, we promised to cling

  to the human whom we’d named and kissed.

  And what a wonder that we did, and have, that years

  have proved us braver than we knew, and merry,

  too, love still searching out each other’s hands,

  as when, beneath the poplars’ summer green,

  we walked from vows to wedding cake and dancing,

  and cars drove in the street below the underpass,

  distracted, to their many destinations.

  for Andrew

  Doing Laundry in Budapest

  The dryer, uniform and squat as a biscuit tin,

  came to life and turned on me its insect eye.

  My t-shirts and underwear crackled and leapt.

  I was a tourist there; I didn’t speak the language.

  My shoulders covered themselves up in churches,

  my tongue soothed its burn with slices of pickle.

  More I don’t remember: only, weekends now

  when I stand in the kitchen, sorting sweat pants

  and pairing socks, I remember the afternoon

  I did my laundry in Budapest, where the sidewalks

  bloomed with embroidered linen, where money

  wasn’t permitted to leave the country.

  When I close my eyes, I recall that spinning,

  then a woman, with nothing else to sell,

  pressing wilted flowers in my hands.

  There’s a River

  There’s a river that’s not near us,

  flowing through a city we’ll never see.

  Thousands of cars drive back and forth

  to and from the center each day,

  planes land from faraway places.

  Millions of people work in the shops,

  factories, banks, the tall new buildings—

  people who have never heard of us,

  and never will; neither in the schools

  will our names appear on the rolls.

  The theaters will perform comedies,

  the community band play on holidays,

  and none of these will hear our applause.

  To parties there, we’ll never be invited.

  There’s an ocean that’s not near us,

  too, just an hour from the town’s outskirts.

  At night, its black waves absorb the stars

  into its great depths, and the fish

  for which we will never acquire a taste

  swim placidly through the weeds.

  Epiphany

  Because all water is holy

  this day, believers descend

  into rivers hewn free

  of two months’ ice.

  Into the burning black

  they plunge, flailing,

  raising their arms

  against the lashing cold.
r />   And if they open

  their eyes underneath—

  before scrambling out—

  what might they see

  moving over the water’s

  surface? The flashes

  of cameras, like the wings

  of so many doves?

  Or their names,

  vivid as silver,

  rushing toward them

  from the open sea?

  No, it’s not

  The body of Christ, the priest murmurs,

  placing a morsel of bread in my palm.

  Only I hear my son whisper, No, it’s not.

  Eight-year-old skeptic, creed-smasher,

  how to stop the erosion of what’s possible?

  Or unhook faith from what can be seen?

  One evening, strolling the Jersey bay,

  we took flailing horseshoe crabs

  by their spiny tails, tossing them into tides

  so they could glide back to the deep sea.

  And wasn’t that impulse, to save the ugly,

  Love? My doubter, miracle-denier,

  may God hurl your spikey edges into the waves.

  May you be cradled in His body forever.

  Sea Glass

  Honey-brown fragments,

  grass-green chips and shards,

  the white lip of a lost jar.

  These bits, left behind

  by the tide’s wide nets,

  shine, sea petals, between

  oyster and mussel shells,

  or the claws and hollowed-

  out wells of horseshoe crabs.

  They’ve tumbled up and down

  the ladders of wave and stream

  till their edges pock over,

  opaque and velveteen.

  Beer bottles smashed

  and dropped into dark places,

  lashed and sorted in deep

  swells. No trails, no traces.

  And why this amber scrap

  and not another? My hands

  sieve sand, then drop

  the stranded pieces in my pail.

  Something salvaged, sunlit,

  gem-like. Something saved

  from the grinding into grit.

  IV

  Late Renoir

  To inhabit these bathing bodies—

  pink, nude, with upturned breasts

  and nipples like rosewater candy—

  is to smudge away doubt, to blend

  beneath willow-green and azure

  the mutilation of war, his dead wife,

  the black he banished from his palette.

  Always the angles lushly rendered,

  women’s thighs and bellies luminous,

  edible, like tinted meringues.

  Nannies, nymphs, whose hair

  swept their shoulders like études

  in the major key. And yet, beneath

  the lace, the hook and eye of pain,

  hands crippled with arthritis,

  the cold snap of knowledge

  like a garter pressing into flesh.

  Extermination, the only motive

  for preservation, for beauty.

  Like a peach swimming in its jar

  of sugared juices, hollow

  where the pit was knifed away.

  Valentine Godé-Darel (1873–1915)

  Five paintings by Ferdinand Hodler

  This beautiful head, this whole body, like a Byzantine empress on the mosaics of Ravenna—and this nose, this mouth—and the eyes, they too, those wonderful eyes—all these the worms will eat. And nothing will remain, absolutely nothing!

  —HODLER, LETTER TO HANS MüHLESTEIN

  1915: The Dead Valentine Godé-Darel

  Someone has buckled black shoes on her feet.

  The lines in the painting sweep horizontally,

  for All things have a tendency towards the horizontal, to spread out

  like water on the earth. Her body is a solitary animal

  on its way to the dirt. Three blue stripes mark the wall

  above the bed—are they sky, water, or empty of meaning?

  The indifferent flatness of the mattress, her bed frame,

  the wooden floor—her thin arms resting on her belly.

  This is what’s left. The pure unanimated flesh of her.

  Hodler kept painting, five oils the day after her death.

  But why those shoes? The polished shine of the hides.

  1915: The Dying Valentine Godé-Darel

  The morning before she died, her worn head rests

  against the white pillow. White sheets, mouse gray walls.

  No roses, no clocks, no weeping willow. Her nose is larger now.

  Her eyes and mouth are wide open, she is almost a corpse.

  Life slips in and out of her slowing breath like a shadow. Her mouth is a heart-

  shaped cave. Once her lover craved her body.

  Over two hundred paintings, and still he documents the changes.

  He observes her. His obsessive brush, does love move it?

  Or does he paint despite their love? He stays by her bed.

  Once, he knelt before her and leant his head against her belly.

  The muscle in her throat stands out like a welt.

  There is not a streak of red in the room.

  1914: Valentine Godé-Darel in Bed, with Clock and Roses

  Eyeing the wall, she has turned her gaze from the painter.

  Though he’s two decades older, she’s the one dying.

  Her black braid reaches her shoulder. A green stripe

  crawls up her neck. Her fingers rest, long and unclenched.

  Three red roses float vaseless at the foot of her bed.

  And in the far right top corner, a tiny clock. Time consumes,

  merciless as a mountain. Even mountains wear down

  with age and they lie flat like water. But not yet, not yet.

  There are the roses, and the clock, and the embroidery smocked

  on her sleeve—three silver circles—such stubborn prettiness.

  1914: The Sick Valentine Godé-Darel in Bed, with Folded Hands

  The red of her hair has darkened. Her fingers are clasped, as if in prayer.

  But she is not praying. Those eyes—

  how fiercely they stare at her lover as he paints her.

  She is propped up on her pillow, too weak to sit on her own.

  He mixes sage and brown, filling in the angles at her cheekbones.

  Grief, rage, pity—a pair of unreadable eyes—

  wet against the vertical peach strokes of her face.

  1913: Valentine Godé-Darel with Disheveled Hair

  Her head’s upright and tilted slightly to one side.

  The consciousness of beauty tumbles from her face

  like her unbound auburn hair. That ballerina’s neck,

  the slightly open, slightly smiling mouth. Another woman

  could imagine the pleasure of kissing her. Or of feeding

  her slices of cold apples, the flesh as white as her teeth.

  Her eyes are so heavy with love that her lids droop.

  Soon, she will bear a daughter. How fruitful her body.

  An empress, a painter, a muse, a woman whose breasts are starting to ripen.

  Portraits in the Country

  Gustave Caillebotte, 1876

  Four women sit at a park’s round tables

  beside a bank of red geraniums,

  each head silently bent to a task:

  mending with fine needles, crocheting,

  one reclined with a book on her lap.

  No hurrying, no marking the moment’s news,

  all of which will be lost in the vast

  scrap bag of time.

  Today, I, too,

  take my handful of quietness,

  cease striving after wind, goal, toil.

  I am shutting my ears to the hours,

  to the bell tower’s quarterly reminder

  that I should be doing so
mething useful.

  For death has come to our windows,

  the preacher says, it has entered our palaces.

  But I will not rush to push down my sash.

  Instead, I will turn the leaf of my book.

  See with what gentle gravity God

  lets it hover, in balance, then fall to its side.

  “Aren’t we all so brave?”

  (P.S., who died of cancer in 2011)

  It’s all right, a friend said, when I asked her

  about dying. She could barely speak, the dead

  had already visited her, she was thin with a swollen

  belly, like a sparrow who’d swallowed a bell.

  I think of three women with brain tumors,

  comparing the sizes of their growths the way

  one might examine a one-eyed kitten.

  Hectors, each one of them, in their gaping gowns,

  waiting for the helmets that clamp

  their skulls in place for radiation—one bent

  the same evening over her toddler’s bed.

  Courage the last resource of the woman,

  arms strapped overhead, pulled into the PET

  after she couldn’t climb stairs without coughing.

  Why didn’t she scream as the smiling doctor

  showed her slides of her lung, collapsed like a ball

  sieved by a dog’s gnawing incisors?

  Why, instead, did she just nod, and even wish,

  on her way out, the nurses a Merry Christmas?

  Because those before us have scattered bravery

  like pebbles through the horror, the funneling dark,

  knowing we should not lose what makes us human.

  Because the well-thumbed stones we eat in terror

  turn to wafers in our mouths.

  Saint Sunday

  In certain folktales, she appears with Mary,

  pierced through with the scissors and needles

  of girls who worked, forbidden, on Sundays.

  She is marred with knives, and scarred

  with scythes wielded disobediently.

  I imagine Christ’s gentle hands, healing

  his battered Saint, pulling nails from her flesh,

  gauzing over the wounded, bleeding breast.