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Four Poems
INTERVIEW
First, you are outnumbered: three to ten of them,
one of you. Each leans on your vita
as if it were a place mat. You wear
an interview suit: starched labels
fidget from your coccyx to your knotted neck.
They sit you in the preheated depressions
of another candidate's nervousness
and swirl your mind into a soup of names
you could never remember, bubbles of eyes,
smiles of string beans. Manicured fingers fist
around pencils, twist studded rings. Your tongue
swells into a ripe apple, too large to form
the right words, too slick to bite in time.
Then one pinches your collar, to see if you're
100% or synthetic. Another thrusts
a business card under your arm, to litmus
whether you're poly- or unsaturated. That
something thin worming into
your right ear, coming out the left is
mental floss. Two of them saw it back and forth,
slicing through the length of you,
and open you like a refrigerator to see
if the light goes on. They inspect
your drawers for uneaten spinach, decades
of unfinished glasses of milk. They calibrate
your tomatoes, toast your cold cuts and buns. Someone
unscrews your shelves with a dime and shakes you
like a pinball machine to see if he can score.
Meanwhile, you must keep cool, pre-shrunk,
so they can truss you with lines of policy,
baste you with a chorus of benefits. Buttered up,
the better to slide you through the mail slot,
you leave. They roll your vita
into toothpicks and joints, discuss if
thirty K is too little, forty too much,
like a commercial estimating prunes.
You will wonder in your bed if you
were the hole for their button, the shell
for their egg, the wallet for their wads of bills.
You will rise, hungry, open
your refrigerator, empty but for
something on the center rack,
a heart, your heart.
It will fit in your hand.
You will eat.
First Published in If I Had a Hammer: Women's Work. Ed. Sandra Martz. Watsonville: Papier-Mache Press, 1990.
Reprinted in Future Cycle, and The Journal of the American Management Association.
***
PASSOVER
My father wouldn't lead me down the aisle:
you were a Jew
and hadn't asked him,
cognac to cognac, for my hand.
Good Catholic Hungarian girls marry
Royal Austro-Hungarian Empire types,
have children to speak
Hungarian for Grandpa's dollars.
For years my father came to brag
about the war: ministering to German
soldiers; his chocolates, Gillettes,
and stockings for their wives.
He brought wine from Polish vineyards
I feared
unspeakably fertilized,
some sympathetic magic I couldn't drink.
Don't let them lie to you, he spoke
like a spell over my Holocaust books,
Catholic priests, good people were killed
more than Jews.
Jewish bankers, Jewish doctors,
Jewish control of the media...
I asked him not to.
Robbed of his conjugating adjective,
he can't speak.
He holds vigil by our bedroom window,
his eye filling the pane like frost,
assuring himself no children will mix
his blood with the Jews'.
In spring I gather flowered Seder plates
from Fortunoff's, saffron tablecloth,
new five-fingered vase.
I bury our pots in the garden,
as your mother once did,
to purify them,
so we can all eat.
Originally published in Visions: International
59 (1999).
Reprinted in Writers at the Water's Edge. Ocean Grove: Tri-Muse,
2003.
Reprinted in Dovetail: A Journal By and For Jewish/Christian
Families. May/June (2003).
***
TAKING PHOTOGRAPHS
My mother's Canon Sureshot lens
opens like a cosmic hole
and sucks in my front door.
Already she has taken the pin oak
that grew out of the lawn.
Ah well, it dropped too many leaves,
now maybe the sun will make more roses
for funerals and weddings.
She lowers her camera to size her next frame,
dives back behind that single eye in
time for me to jump away.
Click , click, she takes my newel post,
newly stripped of forty years of paint,
butcher-waxed to a lustrous sheen;
and snap, there go my moon boots,
lined up so neatly for her coming.
Zoom, zoom, she goes to the "Ladies Room"
to squeeze off my eggshell Belgian sink,
then of course to my bedroom to shed
the coat I hand-me-upped to her, and
to burn into her emulsion my bed,
my stuffed Bugs Bunny, my Buddha-bellied ape.
My closet, where hung my red Chesterfield
with the black velvet collar,
is Cyclops schlurp.
My study where hung my crystal heart is
flash, the void.
She mugs my husband's desk, his shoes, his chair,
The Herald that was hiding him,
him. She photographs the dahl I stewed
for her, the potpourri wafting pine and myrrh,
and oops, she shoots herself and the camera
in the front hall mirror.
There she floats, a single sanpaku* eye:
hungry, unblinking,
exposed.
*Japanese word for a condition whereby the whites of the eye show above
and/or below the iris, symptomatic of acid/alkali imbalance in the body.
First Published in South Coast Poetry Journal
***
SQUEEZE PLAY
All night, the Mets and Rockies foul
balls into the bleachers
and I find myself wanting them
to tip one my way,
slip it like a coin into my blue
plastic commemorative
baseball cap ice cream cup,
for I know now what I didn't before.
Forty years, God help me, since I failed
to memorize who was on which base
being traded for what
so Don Giordano would love me,
thirty-eight years since Kenny Texa pitched me a line
about going to a guys-only game,
breaking his promise to teach me, instead,
how to park.
Never mind, I never was the kind of girl who actually
liked men waving their sticks,
cheered them fingering their balls,
stared at their diamond for all it was worth.
Only fast girls, I told myself, let boys get to first,
then second, and then, well,
it was safer to be a shortstop widow
than a bleacher bride.
But tonight, you steered me to my box seat,
pressed your Carvel and peanuts into my hands,
grateful for my coming. And I scored myself
a wonderful wife, no longer a girl struck out:
I'm begging for hits, suffering over flies;
give me a tripleheader tonight for all those years,
a game of twenty-seven innings; I want this
study in anticipation, this festival of comets,
this reprieve from a life without bases,
this you becoming a boy again
and me a girl who catches it all
and slides us home.
First Published in Spitball
Copyright 2007
***
Three prose excerpts:
[Confess] Caress the Dragon:
[Writhing] Writing Memoir
I am [riddling] struggling with
Dragon NaturallySpeaking, a voice-activated word processing system.
I am jabbing at the telephone redial button to the Dragon help-line
so I can [writhe] [right] write, this [hex]
text. I am desperate for this to work, because my
hands are [devested] devastated by computer-generated
carpal tunnel syndrome and other injuries too frustrating to [settle]
[sell] spell into this program. How to [race] trace the roots of this injury? How to recover myself?
Inevitably, this [shames] shapes itself
as memoir. Shame (nice typo, I am ashamed of my Hungarian family).
So I try to superachieve: prove to the world that I am a writer and not
my divorced mother off with a [oracular] Dracular boyfriend
named "Béla"; prove that I am a [infest her] professor
and not the Grandmother who concocted gypsy hair-and-chicken-heart potions
in coconut shells to counteract menopause; [groove] prove that I am a computer wiz and not
Uncle Frank, who, in religious self-flagellation, bearing and atoning
for family guilt, walked the cold streets of Paterson [hare foot]
barefoot. A novel, dissertation, textbook, two thousand
poems, and a stress management manual I've been willing to write anything.
Anything but [festering] (good one, Dragon) fessing up to my truth. The more I achieve, the more I have to
achieve, the less worthy I feel, the harder I work, the more my hands hurt.
Things, bizarre and uncanny,are happening: I want to write
"first we" and Dragon NaturallySpeaking records Father
died. How did it know I was, just then, thinking about my father's
death? [Death.] When I first started to train Dragon
NaturallySpeaking and paused to think, and forgot to turn the microphone
off, the program made words from my breathing: death, death
it wrote; death in lights; death and death.
I started wondering, what [wounds] (there it goes) what words,
what subterranean messages will be lost once the system is fully trained
(or I actually read the instructions on how to position the mike). Someone
should do a study of what it is that a voice-recognition computer can
pick up from our breathing. What is it we say under our [breasts]
(yes), under our [births] (do it), under our breaths
when we are not articulating words that are safe to say?
. . .
From the manuscript of "Still Hungary: A Memoir"
First published in Fugue 29 (Summer 2005): 142-146.
***
From:
LULLABY: CRADLE SONG
My Grandmother Mumchi is stuffed when she dies, like the
buck head snagging evil spirits by the door. See, there, the cobwebs in
his antlers. Mumchi sits, or rather, is sat, on the couch, wearing white
lace fingerless gloves, her eyes propped open, her lips shaped into a
smile. She is behind me. I am sitting at the piano: an old black coffin-sized
Shoninger with its too many teeth, and, on top, the lamp, like a single
burning eye. I play Mumchi "Liebesträume" and "Moonlight Sonata."
We have trained me for this since I was ten years old, this scene she asks
me to create, that she be stuffed when she dies. But first, go back.
"Three. I am three." Fold my thumb toward my palm with
my pinkie and work my middle three fingers from their bent bunny-ear curve
to straight and proud. That is how old I am. Három a Magyar
igazság": "Three is the truth of Hungary," the three
of the Catholic Trinity, the three of the red/white/green of the flag.
Someone would have asked me, Hány éves vagy? "How
old are you?" Hány means "how many" in English. In Hungarian,
hány can also mean "throw up."
I am at the piano. I sit on a telephone book on the black
bench, and Mumchi, her large breasts pressed into my back, grabs the sides
of the bench and pushes me in. The layers of pages pinch at the backs
of my knees, if I shift my weight. I press my feet hard enough onto a
pile of books on the floor so that it will not topple. It would not do
if I toppled the books Mumchi had to kneel on the floor to place. Just
so. Now Mumchi is sitting next to me, to my right, on a separate chair.
This is the dining room. Behind us is the long table covered with dusty
lace. In front, beyond the wall, is the kitchen. I want to be in the kitchen.
Not sitting by the piano.
This is not just the white keys: smooth, mysterious, perfectly
next to each other, reaching so far to either side of me that even laying
my chin on them and stretching out my arms, I cannot reach, reach those
wonderful bong, bong notes at one end, reach on the other
those ping pings of angels' harps. This is not just the black
keys, like steps to climb, like chocolate fingers. This is Grandmother
sitting beside me, waiting. She is not happy.
The score for Brahms's "Lullaby (Cradle Song)" is spread
open on the narrow music shelf in front and above me. The paper is brownish
and torn at the corner where it has been touched over and over to be turned.
Here I will sit until I play it right, as if I were sitting in front of
a plate of seared chicken livers I must eat before I can go play in the
garden. I must sit by the keys until I can take those black notes on the
page and, as if with the invisible spots of moisture from my fingertips,
press them onto the keys. And then, in the magic that is the inside of
a piano, a soft felt hammer will touch a string. And it will speak back
to me as if I had done nothing to make the sound. Yet I must touch and
touch the keys. I must begin.
In her hand, Mumchi has an orange stick, like a long wide
pencil with no eraser and no point. It is one of my orange Tinkertoy sticks
that I push into round Tinkertoy holes to make boxes and dogs and stars.
Tinkertoys paint my hands red and yellow and blue and green if I play
with them too long. She is slapping this one into her palm and counting
in Hungarian�slap Egy, slap Kato, slap Három.
Like a waltz. I can dance the waltz: step, step, step; step, step, step.
Two black keys wait right in the middle of the keyboard,
right in front of me. On the left is middle C Tsay. Between is
D Day. To the left is E Aee. I hold my fingers over
the keys. Spread them so they will reach toward the first notes. Lower
my hands to just touch the cool slippery surface of the keys. Begin. For
now, it's la lah la la lah la la. I will later sing it in English:
Lullaby, and good night, little oops.My
finger slips. Start again. La lah, lalalah La, la, Ow.
Again. Start all over again. At the beginning. Lullaby, and good,
little Stop. Look at it. Again. To the
top of the page. Slap goes the stick in Mumchi's hand. Lullaby, and
good Not. This time I don't even get to the little.
Pock! Rap! says the stick on the score.
Mumchi is hammering my stick on the score. She is leaving orange half
moons on the page. Pock! Rap! Get it
right. This time. Lullabyan-dgoodni. "Too fast," she says, "Slow
down. NOW."
It will be a very long time before I work through the notes
on this first line of this song. Get them right. If I get to the end of
the first line, I must come back to the beginning of the next. If I get
any note wrong, I must begin again with Lullaby at the top of
this page. And forever, until I get to the end, those ghost half
notes with no black centers, only stems trailing up like smoke on the
upper staff, or down on the lower like a walking stick, and the two eyes
with their arched eyebrows stacked above them, not side by side as they
should, they will, all unchanging, wait.
. . .
From the manuscript of "Still Hungary: A Memoir"
First Place Essay: 2003 Personal Essay Contest. Fugue
First published in Fugue 25 (Summer 2003): 12-22.
Cited as a "Notable Essay" in The Best American Essays: 2004.
***
From:
MY TRIANON: A PALIMPSEST
At the worst times, when you encounter someoneaggressively unwilling to share, you dream of beingdismembered, cut up to meet competing demands.
Mary Bateson, Composing a Life
My first experience with writing is drawing. I am in that
vast present which is the experience of childhood. Instead of suns, and
dogs, and houses, Mumchi, my mother;s mother, is teaching me how to draw
the map of Hungary. The yellow hexagonal pencil rests in the circle of
my right thumb and first finger, as I rest in the C made by her
lap and ample breasts. She squeezes her hand around mine, and, so possessed,
I draw the old motherland in one unbroken pencil line moved by a will
that has memorized every curve and wriggle of the borders, and of the
two rivers: the Danube, the Tisza, running down the middle like two raindrops
on glass. I want to pull away from her hand, and that other hand, my own, so
fused with hers.
Almost fifty years later, I pull Mumchi's scrolled map
out of a cardboard tube long abandoned in the basements of many moves.
The border of Hungarian family crests curled innermost is stained with
mouse droppings almost indecipherable from oily fragments of sunflower
seed. From this perspective, pre-1920 Hungary looks like a headless and
legless torso with a fingerless hand toward the lower left corner and,
at the top, an indentation like that in a priest's Roman collar. The rivers
Danube and Tisza cascading down the center seem to form, variously, a
bib, a coral necklace, or boiled shirt front. (continued below)
Although Mumchi lived for forty years in the United States,
she barely spoke English, could never seem to leave Hungary, to stop believing
it to be this spread, before World War I, from the Carpathian Mountains
to the Adriatic Sea. But in 1918, on what would be my birthday in 1951, October
17, Kálmán Tisza, then Premier of Hungary, had announced
"We have lost the war." In 1920, according to the subsequent Treaty of
Trianon, the settlement with the Allies, Czechoslovakia took the Roman
collar and the collarbone; Romania took the large amorphous lobe to the
east; Yugoslavia, the belly and the fingerless hand. Hungarians refer
to the Trianon variously as "The Crucifixion" and "The Dismemberment."
What remained was, literally, the heart, Budapest, bisected by its aortal
river, the Danube. Hungarians, globally, still yearn for reunion and deliverance.
But I am four years old. It is 1955, Passaic, New Jersey. Through me,
Mumchi is reconstructing her Hungary freehand. When the line journeys
back to its starting point, her hand curled over mine, traces its borders
with a waxy-smelling green Crayola in its fraying paper sleeve. Next,
I zigzag the red crayon at the left third, the center leave blank (for
white), and the right third scribble green, the colors scratching through
the borders we traced. Together, Mumchi and I chant Piros,
Fehér, Zold: ez a Magyar fold . .
. . what I will later know in English as "Red, White, Green, this
is Hungary." At four, I cannot know that what I am feeling is Mumchi's
nostalgia and pride in so resurrecting the homeland. Nonetheless, I feel
important for the heavy feeling in my throat and chest as we boast: Magyar
vagyok, MAGYAR: "Hungarian, I am HUNGARIAN." I am someone. The stutter
and the stress ennoble the despair. . .
From the manuscript of "Still Hungary: A Memoir"
First published in Nimrod: International Journal 46.2 Spring/Summer
(2003): 194-203.
Copyright 2007 |
