Shirley Kaufman

Not for their ice-pick eyes, their weeping willow hair, and their clenched fists beating at heaven. Not for their warnings, predictions of doom. But what they promised. I don’t care if their beards are mildewed, and the ladders are broken. Let them go on picking the wormy fruit. Let the one with the yoke around his neck climb out of the cistern. Let them come down from the heights in their radiant despair like the Sankei Juko dancers descending on ropes, down from these hills to the earth of their first existence. Let them follow the track we’ve cut on the sides of mountains into the desert, and stumble again through the great rift, littered with bones and the walls of cities. Let them sift through the ashes with their burned hands. Let them tell us what will come after.

I saw the hand of Rasputin cast in bronze and used as an oversized paperweight on someone’s desk. The authentic hand. Smooth as Italian leather. It was molded from plaster before he was killed. Bought at an auction in Europe. She was a collector. She knew the value of everything. I wouldn’t like Rasputin’s hand on my desk, even though it wore the skin over its fine bones like a soft glove and healed the tsarevitch. I wouldn’t like her Samurai sword. I’m glad I don’t know what I’m worth. There are days when the whole world feels like somebody else’s collection. Even your hands. We walk in another country and the mist slowly rises above the lake like the heaviness we left, dissolving. Only it’s not our heaviness. * Sometimes, waking, I forget where I am. The things around me go on with their old existence like props in a play, as if the curtain has just risen on a room in an Italian villa. It’s not my play. In the old life there was a photo of Valentino on my desk. Agnes Ayers was swooning in his arms, the Sheik in a rapture of lips without any words. Benevolent uncles spoke in a language. I didn’t know, their fleshy hands, their anxious eyes smiling as they patted me gently on the head. Like watching a silent movie, when they opened their mouths like fish under water I turned off the sound. All that sweet absence. * Once I learned the thirteen principles of Rabbi Salanter, but I remember only seven: truth, diligence, honor, repose, cleanliness, frugality, and silence. If I collected words they would have to belong, like moss or fleas. Things you say that I can believe in. Honor reminds me too much of the Samurai. I like repose. It belongs to this landscape where even the lizards rest when we stand still and look at the wall together. Naming the things of this world you begin to own them. Cyclamen. Mustard. I can’t manage so many flowers. But I already know the word for lake in Italian. * Gulls wheel over Lago di Como at sundown on their way south trying to catch the last warm currents. Their wings are white, then silver, and then smoke when the light abandons them and dusk settles in their feathers. If you don’t collect things, it’s easier to move. Easier to stand on this cliff for another minute and watch the leaves fall, one by one, yellow, into the lake. They belong to the air for the time they are drifting. It’s a long way down.