The Bernstein Plot
Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, NY
 
 
Up the hill where Washington’s rough-cut men                    
were out-flanked by the British, whipped and fled
by dinghy in the night to fight again;
here where the city’s blue bloods grave their dead,
we’ve trudged in the late August heat past wings
and needles, chiseled mausoleums,
marble cherubs (though no choir sings)                     
and found your marker, short on facts, which seems  
scarcely to grasp what deft band-master, giddy
on your more than life-size stage, the world, dreams
underneath; but at least the grass is tended,
bushes trim and ruddy rhododendrons, loud
but not too loud, bloom like an early Mahler ditty,
flush among the fashionable crowd. 
 ​

 
The Sinner at Six
             
 
Into the candled dark where haloed strangers
mingled in jigsaw-puzzle windows, Lily,
my Irish nursemaid and first love, snuck me
whenever my Jewish parents nodded.
Back when the Mass was still in Latin,
one Sunday in my boredom
I begged to hold the string of holy beads
she counted on for luck and in
my fidgets twisted it until it broke
apart and spilled its tiny white
and purple jewels into my lap.
 
Shame wet my cheeks and terror
seized me by the throat. I knew
that I was damned and, worse, Lily
might also go to hell for what I’d done,
and hell was like the front yard leaves we heaped
each fall and lit, each leaf a separate soul
that shriveled curling inward as it flamed,
then turned to smoke and ash. In hell, they said,
you burned like that forever. But seeing
my stricken face, she asked me why,
and when I unpeeled my young fists full
of tiny lights, she brushed my tears away,
and whispered that her beads could be restrung.