Self-Portrait on the Way to a Holy Place
In the highest heat of the day, I labor
up those thousand steps mumbling
curse words and complaints.
A black beetle flipped
on its back, panicked
legs hailing, hoping.
Sun-stroked concrete scorches
what stays too long.
I swat a cloud of gnats (what a pain!),
scoop up the beetle with a small piece of paper,
set it down upright in the shade.
Some old local women smile.
I smile back as if
to say of course; we Americans aren’t always ______!
I do not understand fear
of God. I die,
isn’t that enough. Maybe
the terrible-god-within
that deprives until gums bleed, until
eyes conjure Bosch’s beaks on faces, guts
every drop of promise until
my will forgets
it’s threaded to the gods.
Until I fold myself into some fragment.
And yet when I chaperone that terrible-god (if I give you a name),
I-to-I,
beaks de-form into peonies,
I hold hearts tender, mold
both palms,
that is to say: like psalms.
I Was, Sometimes
If not concrete, I was river;
icy runoff unable to feel Spring.
Once sky, the color of my mother’s favorite blouse.
If not the blues of my mother, of her mother’s eyes.
And hands baking rugalach, knowing just how much of each
spice to gentle each piece, if not the fig or its tree.
When not my grandmother’s vital hands,
her feet, braved her from Poland to America
alone at 16, not yet knowing
all the faces she would forget.
I was the tears of her morning,
and a tongue not having yet learned tenderness.
I was not my father’s blindness
nor his vandalizing MS
but his urge to flee his body, and like the distance runner
I ran, more than sometimes.
I was, once, my grandfather’s prayer,
With his shawl wrapping G-d around
him, the sway of his davenen
merging him with his holy book.
I was not, even once, the holy
book; perhaps once one holy
gaze, as shofar sounding the end
of a long walk, perhaps the wandering,
as virga, the desert grasses’ tease.
One taste of nothing as profane
left me wondering
what I was, or sometimes,
not.
