Grandfather
How like your wife
my mother looked,
like your wife
felt your love
chill to the bone.
How like your wife
Mother felt
your slam to the face,
your wife not there
to take those whacks.
How early in life
your wife dead,
rheumatic fever
you said, though
rumored your doing,
Oh, that your wife
would have lived
to know her daughter
married a gentle man,
a decent man.
How I wish that
grandmother of mine
had been there
to mother more
so I could have.
----------------------------------------------------
The Barber
Alois lifts my mother’s wet tresses,
glides them through his fingers,
smoothes flat, focuses on the task
of trimming, shaping, redefining.
His comb passes over tangles
of twisting fiber & thickening plaque.
I watch Mother live with whatever
cut he gives, watch her face
in the mirror, her silver hair
shines. She doesn’t look
or look away. My thoughts stray
to her beauty-parlor days:
once back home, she’d head straight
to her bedroom, root herself at her vanity,
pull & pull her cropped locks
trying to stretch them back
to a length she could live with.
------------------------------------------------------------
3rd Ave. and 85st St., NYC
Waves of “Mood Indigo”
drew me to
a well-dressed crowd
ushered in a hush
bursting with flowers
leading to a stiff
in elegant tux
pleated shirt starched
as his expression.
Duke Ellington
(yes in the flesh)
laid to rest
and I paid last respects
hastened home on the ‘A’ train
dug my 8-tracks up
jived with the jazz man
into wee hours
of night.
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It's Hard to Tell
My daughter has lived far
from me as long
as I can remember
& when I find her
through binoculars
she gave me one Mother's Day
I see her arm raised
hand waving--
a striking resemblance
to me posed in a locket
I gave her on her birthday.
--------------------------------------------------
my father's eyes
i never knew my father
to come toward me without
a somber face —
eyes that never looked
directly into mine
for if they had
wouldn't he have gleaned
my smile and wouldn’t that
have stopped him
from passing me by
i’ll never know
the time is past
like the sunday shine
on his shoes
the crease in his fedora
-------------------------------------
Raus! Raus!
Yanked out of childhood
in the middle of the night,
my husband at ten years old,
his father shaking him
awake to soldiers shouting,
his father among the men
lined up in the town square,
shot dead in sight
of the quaking truckload
of mothers, daughters, sons
routed out of their houses,
driven further into the dark.
