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From the dim hallway, walls swollen with summer damp. Concave threshold to the morning’s livid light. When my father said Gerrard Street East, his voice. The passing subway tremors upwards, into me, reverberates in 
ligaments and membranes. On canvas shoes through minor parks, a pinball in a rudderless machine. My father, transiently animate. Funny in the ebbing language, 
bantering with shopkeepers. A lifeguard pours bleach in the fractured blue wading pool, sloshes it out with her legs. If  I could, I’d view a produce stand as he did, fill a paper bag with dillweed, bitter melon, ladyfingers. Miraculous reversal poster in the window of the Portuguese 
apothecary. Who lived where he never resembled somebody. Belled, metal restaurant elephant. They’re barely open. The woman fills and seals samosas in the uproar of a standing fan. I have tea. Father, dayflower, I keep arriving at this dead end where the menu says exotic, stamped with sickle chilis. The fan blades clatter frantically in their cage. A ghetto blaster spools ghazals. Her husband, over the counter, shouts:The pavements here are very bad. You must take your walks on the pitch, in circles. This is what all of us do.

The jewelled steps are already quite white with dew, It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings, And I let down the crystal curtain And watch the moon through the clear autumn.

How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves, Close by the street of this fair seaport town, Silent beside the never-silent waves, At rest in all this moving up and down! The trees are white with dust, that o'er their sleep Wave their broad curtains in the south-wind's breath, While underneath these leafy tents they keep The long, mysterious Exodus of Death. And these sepulchral stones, so old and brown, That pave with level flags their burial-place, Seem like the tablets of the Law, thrown down And broken by Moses at the mountain's base. The very names recorded here are strange, Of foreign accent, and of different climes; Alvares and Rivera interchange With Abraham and Jacob of old times. "Blessed be God! for he created Death!" The mourners said, "and Death is rest and peace;" Then added, in the certainty of faith, "And giveth Life that nevermore shall cease." Closed are the portals of their Synagogue, No Psalms of David now the silence break, No Rabbi reads the ancient Decalogue In the grand dialect the Prophets spake. Gone are the living, but the dead remain, And not neglected; for a hand unseen, Scattering its bounty, like a summer rain, Still keeps their graves and their remembrance green. How came they here? What burst of Christian hate, What persecution, merciless and blind, Drove o'er the sea — that desert desolate — These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind? They lived in narrow streets and lanes obscure, Ghetto and Judenstrass, in mirk and mire; Taught in the school of patience to endure The life of anguish and the death of fire. All their lives long, with the unleavened bread And bitter herbs of exile and its fears, The wasting famine of the heart they fed, And slaked its thirst with marah of their tears. Anathema maranatha! was the cry That rang from town to town, from street to street; At every gate the accursed Mordecai Was mocked and jeered, and spurned by Christian feet. Pride and humiliation hand in hand Walked with them through the world where'er they went; Trampled and beaten were they as the sand, And yet unshaken as the continent. For in the background figures vague and vast Of patriarchs and of prophets rose sublime, And all the great traditions of the Past They saw reflected in the coming time. And thus forever with reverted look The mystic volume of the world they read, Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book, Till life became a Legend of the Dead. But ah! what once has been shall be no more! The groaning earth in travail and in pain Brings forth its races, but does not restore, And the dead nations never rise again.

We forget where we came from. Our Jewish names from the Exile give us away, bring back the memory of flower and fruit, medieval cities, metals, knights who turned to stone, roses, spices whose scent drifted away, precious stones, lots of red, handicrafts long gone from the world (the hands are gone too). Circumcision does it to us, as in the Bible story of Shechem and the sons of Jacob, so that we go on hurting all our lives. What are we doing, coming back here with this pain? Our longings were drained together with the swamps, the desert blooms for us, and our children are beautiful. Even the wrecks of ships that sank on the way reached this shore, even winds did. Not all the sails. What are we doing in this dark land with its yellow shadows that pierce the eyes? (Every now and then someone says, even after forty or fifty years: "The sun is killing me.") What are we doing with these souls of mist, with these names, with our eyes of forests, with our beautiful children, with our quick blood? Spilled blood is not the roots of trees but it's the closest thing to roots we have.

. . . you have inherited its burden without its mystery. —Elie Wiesel I.   March 1979 and I am watching Nazis march through Chicago. The bold type of the Sun-Times describes a small band of hoodlums, undereducated boy scouts, the better to be ignored. My grandfather, back hunched over his Bible, agrees. Jews like myself should stay home, should lay down our stones and pray like the Jews that we are. II.   Grandfather, you are easy to love with your long beard and the way you sway like a palm branch in the storm. It is easy to romanticize your spiritual search, worldly naiveté and wise rabbinical words. You belong in the books I read by Singer, Peretz, Sholom Aleichem. But their characters are ignorant of the chapters to come. You know where their prayers will lead. III.   A circle. Six Nazis. Your wife in the middle. One soldier says all Jewesses are whores and the others agree. You say nothing. Years later you'll decide to speak: "Do we not serve Hitler's purpose, we who would sooner renounce our beliefs than assume our burdens?" IV.   A generation after the Holocaust and I know no Hebrew. No Yiddish. No Torah. I fast only on the Day of Atonement and even then I've been known to cheat. A generation after the Holocaust and I apologize for my grandfather's bent back and wild gestures. I used to tremble to the rhythm of his prayers. I feared the mysterious words that kept us from the devil. Now, from my window I watch Nazis march. Their feet strike the pavement like the ticking of a clock. I am a Jew a generation after the Holocaust. Poorer, my grandfather says, without a past than he, who has no future.

I would imagine underneath those warming bear hugs was a kinda kind of soul as your many poems attest. Those summer breezes. Those many hazy sunsets nature’s voices echoing afar. A life continually fulfilled bordering on the empty and those inexplicable tragedies, those bad timings unreconciled, then reconciled with time. You had no answer that would satisfy your curiosity and the why, the wherewithal just round the bend. The morning mists descending in an angled quietude. A birdcall here and there. A rising wind unfurled and furling at the top-most branches of a conifer. Those wetlands mysterioso. A last-known address unknown at last.

They put me in a dead boy’s clothes dead Joseph Except he wasn’t dead at first they put Me in his clothes dead Joseph’s     after Joseph Died and I used to call him Joe     they put Me in   Joe’s clothes at first before he died Joe wasn’t five yet when I met him      I Was seven     I was seven when he died Still but a whole year bigger then but I Wore his clothes still and the whole year I lived with Momma Varina      and with daddy Jeff I never lived so good as when I lived with Them and especially it was daddy Jeff Who kept me fed and wearing those nice clothes Until they fit as tight as bandages

there was a remember when the mama was my girl the mama was in my girl biding to turn my girl turn mama when what I got turn to girl in her my girl in my girl make my girl mama they both mine all three I remember a when when I only dreamed dreams but my dreams are remembers now they a when that when was when the girl I made of mama I made a mama with what I got I tell what I tell but I know what I know only a man make his dream a remember and ain’t I a man what’s mine is mine to turn to what I dream what I make mine to make mine I won’t ’bide what won’t turn

The gods do not interest him, nor their debris, nor their terrible storms: he already knows how a body is made to glow, precursor to neon lights — how hunger is hereditary. Sons should not be haunted except by the dead, and his father is sober now, accepts tribute in silence and Coca-Cola. He is thankful for strong knees, for momentum that lives in the mouth and the hands. Here is the fish with the filigree scales, here is the pot of rice — here, here: the grain of rice that makes the bowl a bowl. Tuna’s blood hardening in the water. Here is the night through which he runs, realizing the floor has turned to tissue paper, tearing into morning. No, the gods do not compel him: he cannot bear the sight of the sun, an open sore — prefers the colors of its setting, how they reflect the ocean’s currents, always giving rise to something new or something he has forgotten. The sky as a table, mounds of rice glazed with soy, gleaming like a display of mackerel, like snow general upon the island’s winter spine. Days parade in their uniform; hearts attack, close markets, open new ones. He teaches his sons to gut fish, does not despair his own hands’ speed: salt bandaging a cut, memory fraying at the edges. Reaching, always — the top of the ladder, buried in light —

The wind’s tongue. The always clear cobalt sky bit at your painting. In a prehistoric poster words doze like pebbles. A gallop of  feathers kidnaps the conversation between coarse ropes and wild beasts. You paint within a blinking birthmark the marriage of  heaven and hell faster than tying a ribbon in a mirror. Children’s playground. From some rolling balls one transparent ball flies off. I call it Miró. Translated from the Japanese