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from Sonnets, Second Series XXX Yet, even ‘mid merry boyhood’s tricks and scapes, Early my heart a deeper lesson learnt; Wandering alone by many a mile burnt Black woodside, that but the snow-flake decks and drapes. And I have stood beneath Canadian sky, In utter solitudes, where the cricket’s cry Appals the heart, and fear takes visible shapes; And on Long Island’s void and isolate capes Heard the sea break like iron bars: and still, In all, I seemed to hear the same deep dirge; Borne in the wind, the insect’s tiny trill, And crash and jangle of the shaking surge; And knew not what they meant,—prophetic woe? Dim bodings, wherefore? Now, indeed, I know!

Yet to die. Unalone still. For now your pauper-friend is with you. Together you delight in the grandeur of the plains, And the dark, the cold, the storms of snow. Live quiet and consoled In gaudy poverty, in powerful destitution. Blessed are those days and nights. The work of this sweet voice is without sin. Misery is he whom, like a shadow, A dog’s barking frightens, the wind cuts down. Poor is he who, half-alive himself Begs his shade for pittance. January 15-16, 1937

The people who sang to their children in Yiddish and worked in Yiddish and made love in Yiddish are nearly all gone. Phantasmic. Heym. Der may kumt shoyn on. The month of May has arrived. At the cemetery my aunt has already draped my grandmother's half of the tombstone with a white sheet. The fabric is tacked to the polished granite by gray and brown rocks lifted from my grandfather's side of the plot. He's been gone over twenty-five years. We are in Beth Israel Cemetery, Block 50, Woodbridge, New Jersey for the unveiling and the sky is like lead. We are in my grandmother's shtetl in Poland, but everyone is dead. The Fraternal Order of Bendin-Sosnowicer Sick & Benevolent Society has kept these plots faithfully next to their Holocaust memorial— gray stone archway topped with a menorah and a curse:Pour out Thy wrath upon the Nazis and the wicked Germans for they have destroyed the seed of Jacob. May the almighty avenge their blood. Great is our sorrow, and no consolation is to be found! My sister, in her cardboard kippah, opens her prayer book—a special edition she borrowed from rabbinical school—and begins to read in Aramaic. Not one of us can bring ourselves to add anything to the fixed liturgy. My son is squatting at the next grave over, collecting decorative stones from the Glickstein's double plot. We eat yellow sponge cake and drink small cups of brandy to celebrate my grandmother's life. We are no longer mourners, says Jewish law. Can we tell this story in Yiddish? Put the words in the right places? My son cracks a plastic cup until it's shredded to strips, looks like a clear spider, sounds like an error. When my sister finally pulls back the sheet, all the things my grandmother was barely fit on the face of the marker. A year ago at the funeral, her friend Goldie told me she was strong like steel, soft like butter—women like that they don't make any more. My mother tries to show my grandmother—now this gray marker— my son, how he's grown, but he squirms from her arms.Ihr gvure iz nit tzu beshraiben. Her strength was beyond description. The people who sang to their children in Yiddish and admonished them in Yiddish are nearly all gone, whole vanished towns that exist now only in books, their maps drawn entirely by heart: this unknown continent, this language of nowhere, these stones from a land that never was.Der may kumt shoyn on. The month of May has arrived.Der vind voyet. The wind howls, says I'm not a stranger anywhere. On the stones we write all we remember, but we are poor guardians of memory. Can you say it in Yiddish? Can you bless us?

Memory is flotsam (yes) just below the surface an eternal city a heap of rubble debris smaller than your fist an animal with- out a leash organized wreck- age ghost net or one hanging silence on the phone— she's gone, my sister said, and we wept and wept over my grandmother while my sister sat with her body and me in the static and the rabbi they sent told her to recite psalms as comfort so we listened to each other breathe instead and my sister's breath was a tunnel a handful of pebbles a knotted Chinese jump-rope         her breath was the coiled terrycloth turban our grandmother wore when she cooked or walked the shallow end of her condo pool for exercise— our grandmother still somewhere in her white turban sewing Cornish game hens together with needle and string or somewhere in her good wig playing poker or somewhere in her easy chair watching CNN while cookies shaped like our initials bake in her oven O memory how much you erased how many holes         we punched in your facts since who knows the stories she never told about the camps there are no marked graves just too much food on holidays diabetes my mother's fear of ships and the motion of some suspension bridges O memory you've left us trauma below the surface and some above like the fact that I can't shake the December my sister's red hair caught fire from leaning too close to the menorah's candles, our grandmother putting her out with a dish towel with her strong arms.

I drew solitude over me, on the long shore. —Robinson Jeffers, “Prelude” For whoever does not afflict his soul through this day, shall be cut off from his people. —Leviticus 23:29 What is a Jew in solitude? What would it mean not to feel lonely or afraid far from your own or those you have called your own? What is a woman in solitude:   a queer woman or man? In the empty street, on the empty beach, in the desert what in this world as it is can solitude mean? The glassy, concrete octagon suspended from the cliffs with its electric gate, its perfected privacy is not what I mean the pick-up with a gun parked at a turn-out in Utah or the Golan Heights is not what I mean the poet’s tower facing the western ocean, acres of forest planted to the east, the woman reading in the cabin, her attack dog suddenly risen is not what I mean Three thousand miles from what I once called home I open a book searching for some lines I remember about flowers, something to bind me to this coast as lilacs in the dooryard once bound me back there—yes, lupines on a burnt mountainside, something that bloomed and faded and was written down in the poet’s book, forever: Opening the poet’s book I find the hatred in the poet’s heart: . . .the hateful-eyed and human-bodied are all about me: you that love multitude may have them Robinson Jeffers, multitude is the blur flung by distinct forms against these landward valleys and the farms that run down to the sea; the lupines are multitude, and the torched poppies, the grey Pacific unrolling its scrolls of surf, and the separate persons, stooped over sewing machines in denim dust, bent under the shattering skies of harvest who sleep by shifts in never-empty beds have their various dreams Hands that pick, pack, steam, stitch, strip, stuff, shell, scrape, scour, belong to a brain like no other Must I argue the love of multitude in the blur or defend a solitude of barbed-wire and searchlights, the survivalist’s final solution, have I a choice? To wonder far from your own or those you have called your own to hear strangeness calling you from far away and walk in that direction, long and far, not calculating risk to go to meet the Stranger without fear or weapon, protection nowhere on your mind (the Jew on the icy, rutted road on Christmas Eve prays for another Jew the woman in the ungainly twisting shadows of the street:Make those bea woman’s footsteps; as if she could believe in a woman’s god) Find someone like yourself.   Find others. Agree you will never desert each other. Understand that any rift among you means power to those who want to do you in. Close to the center, safety; toward the edges, danger. But I have a nightmare to tell:   I am trying to say that to be with my people is my dearest wish but that I also love strangers that I crave separateness I hear myself stuttering these words to my worst friends and my best enemies who watch for my mistakes in grammar my mistakes in love. This is the day of atonement; but do my people forgive me? If a cloud knew loneliness and fear, I would be that cloud. To love the Stranger, to love solitude—am I writing merely about privilege about drifting from the center, drawn to edges, a privilege we can’t afford in the world that is, who are hated as being of our kind: faggot kicked into the icy river, woman dragged from her stalled car into the mist-struck mountains, used and hacked to death young scholar shot at the university gates on a summer evening walk, his prizes and studies nothing, nothing availing his Blackness Jew deluded that she’s escaped the tribe, the laws of her exclusion, the men too holy to touch her hand;   Jew who has turned her back on midrash and mitzvah(yet wears the chai on a thong between her breasts) hiking alone found with a swastika carved in her back at the foot of the cliffs (did she die as queer or as Jew?) Solitude, O taboo, endangered species on the mist-struck spur of the mountain, I want a gun to defend you In the desert, on the deserted street, I want what I can’t have: your elder sister, Justice, her great peasant’s hand outspread her eye, half-hooded, sharp and true And I ask myself, have I thrown courage away? have I traded off something I don’t name? To what extreme will I go to meet the extremist? What will I do to defend my want or anyone’s want to search for her spirit-vision far from the protection of those she has called her own? Will I find O solitude your plumes, your breasts, your hair against my face, as in childhood, your voice like the mockingbird’s singing Yes, you are loved, why else this song? in the old places, anywhere? What is a Jew in solitude? What is a woman in solitude, a queer woman or man? When the winter flood-tides wrench the tower from the rock, crumble the prophet’s headland, and the farms slide into the sea when leviathan is endangered and Jonah becomes revenger when center and edges are crushed together, the extremities crushed together on which the world was founded when our souls crash together, Arab and Jew, howling our loneliness within the tribes when the refugee child and the exile’s child re-open the blasted and forbidden city when we who refuse to be women and men as women and men are chartered, tell our stories of solitude spent in multitude in that world as it may be, newborn and haunted, what will solitude mean? 1984-1985

1 That’s right, I’m talking to you, not him or her. 2 You have been randomly selected for a security check. It has nothing to do with you, your physical features, or your name. 3 Do you now belong or have you ever belonged to a radical political organization? Do you have weapons training? Have you ever visited a training camp? Did you pack your own bags? 4 You people send your sons and daughters on suicide missions. You animals, you! 5 If you will please step aside. If you will please remove your shoes. If you will please come with me. If you will please leave the premises. If you will please not harm us. 6 May you live in interesting times. 7 As Americans, you know exactly what I’m talking about. As Americans, you may be subject to this. As Americans, you should be worried. 8 Is it you who are to blame? 9 We cannot help you. There is nothing we can do for you. 10 The agents came looking for you, at your father’s house. 11 They wanted to ask you questions. 12 I heard about you being suspected, detained, interrogated, jailed without charges, prosecuted with secret evidence, found not guilty. There’s no sense in you making a fuss— they let you go free, didn’t they? 13 Once you begin to see you differently, as separate from you, wholly other from you, then you can become like us. 14 What has history made of you? 15 Let’s get to the point: It was always like looking in the mirror— that face is you. I am you.

Sometimes in our sleep we touch The body of another woman And we wake up And we know the first nights With summer visitors In the three storied house of our childhood. Whatever we remember, The darkest hair being brushed In front of the darkest mirror In the darkest room.

You'd think the sky would run out of water, but it won't; it just keeps coming down. I need someone to marvel at the breath escaping from me. Do you have a natural resource you prefer to exploit? Does someone think of you and turn the channel? How would you ever know? Have you ever zoned out during Downton Abbey? I'm certain of something I'd prefer not to tell you about. "Slow down," you say. But I can already see my breath, and its only October. Walking with you is making everything watery and spazzed out, like a movie about sex where I have sex and people are all like, "He's amazing, we really like his sex style!" But I digress. Will you please stand up when called upon to tell the audience how wonderful I was in my best moments; like someone in senior management delegating things and being sure of everything but how to stop? I promise I'll make this up to you. I'll write your name on the menu board, and people will come into the store all expectant of you.

Petrarch dreams of pebbles on the tongue, he loves me at a distance, black polished stone skipping the lake that swallows worn-down words, a kind of drown and drench and quench and very kind to what I would've said. Light marries water and what else (unfit for drinking purposes), light lavishes my skin on intermittent sun. (I am weather and unreasonable, out of all season.  Petrarch loves my lies of laurel leaves, ripped sprigs of deciduous evergreen.) A creek is lying in my cement-walled bed, slurring through the center of small town; the current's brown and turbid (muddy, turbulent with recent torrents), silt rushing toward the reservoir. A Sonata passes by too close (I have to jump) and yes I do hear music here. It's blue, or turquoise, aquamarine, some synonym on wheels, note down that note. It's Petrarch singing with his back to me (delivering himself to voice), his fingers filled with jonquil, daffodils, mistaken narcissus. (I surprised him between the pages of a book, looked up the flowers I misnamed.) Forsythia and magnolia bring me spring, when he walks into the house he has wings. Song is a temporary thing (attempt), he wants to own his music.

You are Jehovah, and I am a wanderer. Who should have mercy on a wanderer if not Jehovah? You create and I decay. Who should have mercy on the decayed if not the creator? You are the Judge and I the guilty Who should have mercy on the guilty if not the Judge? You are All and I am a particle. Who should have mercy on a particle if not the All? You are the Living One and I am dead. Who should have mercy on the dead if not the Living One? You are the Painter and Potter and I am clay. Who should have mercy on clay if not the Painter and Potter? You are the Fire and I am straw Who should have mercy on straw if not the Fire? You are the Listener and I am the reader. Who should have mercy on the reader if not the Listener? You are the Beginning and I am what follows. Who should have mercy on what follows if not the Beginning? You are the End and I am what follows. Who should have mercy on what follows if not the End?