Long Division

The table in this always crowded school basement

needed a matchbook

to prop up the leg.

The folding chairs were cold and metal

and we heaped our coats and bags on a chair

while we sat in our regular seats

together at the corner

as if on a date

so we could hear each other

in the room that was filled with

more tables that wobbled

and people

speaking languages I didn’t know.

She brought her workbook out of her bag

along with a pencil, the kind given out

to elementary students for good behavior

or as favors at birthday parties

all silver and pink.

Long Division.

I thought we were going to work on English,

I told her and she said yes, we could, but she

didn’t know how to do her homework and just wrote in

the answers her teacher wrote on the board

but didn’t know how

to divide.

She was quiet and grateful,

not realizing my comprehension of math

was maybe a lesson ahead of hers.

She showed me the way she worked through the problem,

drawing boxes and filling in with numbers and

I watched her,

her head tilted,

her quiet counting,

her dark fingers holding her pencil,

writing her twos with fancy curls.

I thought of her new home here

in cold and snow,

her in her long flowing colorful skirt

and her black headscarf

and the smile I could see up close

where she would share it.

She’d told me she’d come here

a year ago to visit her brother

and had been chased down the street

by a man yelling at her.

He had a gun.

She hid.

She had no phone.

She didn’t remember where her brother lived.

She spoke no English.

I held her eyes.

I grasped her arm.

I apologized.

We are all people, she said.

How to protect this strong solemn smart woman

who has learned my language

and become a citizen of the country I call home

all within a year

and now spends time with me

learning math

and the superlative

in this school basement,

sharing stories of her father

she left behind

in Djibouti

who has lost his memory

and doesn’t know who she is when she calls him every day?

Here

with her

I am not a week ahead of understanding.

Dinner Party

When called, they’d leave their hors d’oeuvres,
puddles of martinis in their glasses,
remains of smoked oysters, small franks
in bourbon sauce simmering
in a silver chafing dish,
red skinned peanuts
in lead crystal bowls,
linen napkins left crumpled,
filled with olive pits and tasseled toothpicks,
and head into the dining room
to eat dinner served on the china
around the mahogany table with candlelight
and flowers from my mother’s garden,
leaving me in the quiet living room
with the dregs of the smoked cigarettes
which I’d pocket
like Templeton
and bring with matches to the bathroom
I shared with my brother,
placing my lips over
lipstick covered filters,
the smoke escaping
out the crack of open window.

Pool hours

Turning my lounge chair around

placing my back to the lowering sun

the shadow

long and dark

stretches out on the warm tiles in front of me

as I look over the quiet simmer of water in the pool

the line of lounge chairs

at attention.

In this late afternoon hour

the old sunbathers

have wrapped towels

like capes

over their curved freckled shoulders,

slipped on their sandals

and left for early bird dinners

and I am alone

with the salamanders

that wait for now

to come up from the cracks

and face the last warmth of the sun.

These tiny dinosaurs

holding themselves up with

frog-like feet

ponder ancient ancestors

who lived

long before old people

retreated to Florida.

So much in common,

those who sit on these chairs

and those that lurk underneath,

both from a time

and a place

where they were mightier,

now trailing lengthy shadows

behind them.

January 21, 2017

My head a hive

the tangle of thoughts and stings

and tears

yearning for my daughters

and the hand of my husband

while shunning the crowds.

I drove myself

alone

to Pine Point

with the crows and gulls speckling the sky above.

I passed the shuttered summer houses

and walked down the path of snow

and sand to the beach

as the sky began to darken.

I kept to myself when people passed

moving away from them like the plovers that scurry

from the incoming waves

and I shot a quick smile if they got too close.

I listened to the roar

of waves as they curled

and crashed

and found

for the first time ever

whole sand dollars

in the ebbing tide

three of them

salty and wet and gritty

one for each of those

I’m not with today.

On Listening to Fred Hersch

It’s the moment when I’m passing through the living room

where my brother plays the same measures of

Brubeck,

the same each time I walk through

like he only knows a line or two

or needs to keep practicing the same

12 measures

til he gets it right,

but really

this is how he keeps a secret

since no one will ask

whatcha playing?

since it’s always the same

every time he’s home.

The maybe day

when he stops me

and asks me to sit with him on the piano bench.

me,

surprised he knows my name.

I’ve been called on stage

from the audience.

No heart and soul.

Instead he says go ahead.

I’ll play something and you

just improvise.

Play anything. I’ll join you.

I am not an improviser.

I am in Level 4 music theory.

I practice scales.

I know Bach Invention 1 in C

without the trills.

Good. That’s good,

he encourages me,

knowing I will leave soon

with one leg already over the side of the bench.

Sounds nothing like the Schumann I’m learning

(my teacher has scrawled the pages with reminders

about counting

and jabbed it with her pencil

in places I needed to practice

but never did).

Sounds like our own piece

no one will ever ask to hear.

My 2017

I've thought about what I want to do this coming year.  I tend to organize my plans as I always have:

1. Eat
2. Ponder
3. Linger
4. Add to my list
5. list more list things
6. move item to tomorrow's list

But I want so much for it to be this:




I'd like to wake up every day and carry the whole jumbled list with me, like Pig Pen

but not as dusty,
and without the bass.

I want this year to learn how to carry everything I want at the same time. All together.  Not one-a-day like vitamins.

I'm not good at that. I love a lined notebook.

I'll still probably make lists.
I'll still probably move things to tomorrow.
I'll still probably kill the tomatoes and the flowers.

This is why it scares me

I was maybe ten. I remember I'd just heard about the Holocaust and was now stirring it slowly in my mind. I remember asking at dinner.  How did he get to be in power? How did people decide on him? People chose him because they'd been living without. Times were hard. He promised them a better life. More food on the table. More jobs, he promised.  And over time, he told them the reason they didn't have the life they wanted was because of the Jews. And he could help them with that, he'd said.

The Jews were the reason life was bad. The Jews had all the money, he'd said.  They ran the banks. They had all the wealth.  Without them, life would be better.

I stared at my dinner. I remember I asked them Did you know? Did you know what he was doing? They said they had heard rumors. Stories. But no one knew really until after the War.

I remember telling them, Well I wouldn't let that happen. I would have told on him, or some sort of anger a ten year old has. At him. At my parents.

Never again, they say.  I think it used to be a promise. Now I think it's just hopeful.

Children don't know that deadly waves retreating from the beach roar back to shore over time.  Or they know in the way we all do by learning in school. This happened then to people who were around before we knew them so we really only need to know it for a test.  Not because they were real. Not because we can imagine them. Not because it can happen again.

I've seen images showing tour buses headed to Auschwitz and school groups touring the camp. There was laughter as the young kids walked through the gas chambers. I was angry watching. I wouldn't have laughed. I wouldn't even have smiled. But people my children's age stood in the very place where murders happened and were as far removed in that place as we all become from slavery, from devastation, from war.  The human part of the story can't even be captured once the survivors die.

So here I am now a week away from an election where someone has made promises without care, without thought, without plan, who encourages hatred and ignites its fuse. Just 70 years have passed and we are here again. Who will be asking Did you know? I will have known. I will have.  And yet what more can I do than share my fear?  What more can I wish for than that people around me will hear me?