Hansel and Yetta


He was so blond he looked albino,
his hair as if eternally slicked back
by a surfer’s perfect wave. 
He could stop on a dime.
He looked the kind
to make my mother fidget,
and pull me closer toward her,
the way she did in churches— 
Gothic, Romanesque, Baroque.
Yet, when he smiled his benignant smile,
when he gave the benediction of his milky teeth,
it was a Jew’s nightmarish dream
turned fairy tale: the elegant cardinal
comes bearing down, when suddenly you see
the fringes of a tallith peering from
his gorgeous vestments, shadowy sidecurls
dancing at his ears,
and his voice grows thick enough
for the consonants of Hebrew.

He took matzoh on his tongue,
he dipped his fingers in the Passover wine.
I saw myself in his eyes,
warm and magical, loved,
in the way of converts,
more than we loved ourselves. 

Originally published in the The Santa Barbara Independent 1989.



Soft


Your father doesn't have a soft word
for me, mother says at 85.

And I think how hard
her wedge of words, soldiers all, pressing
their old offensive position,
of how fiercely we want
what we neither give
nor deserve,

of how we might live our whole
lives without it—all fault
of our own—and still desire it, still desire 
that sense of the world reining in 
its force and its terror, and attending
to us— 

        as silk slip of cornstarch studies
        the pads of thumb and forefinger

        as newly velveted water says
        to the entering body,
        you are beautiful, you, you

        as snow pear petals
        raining down
        in a balmy wind
        astonish the cheek,
        saying hush, hush,
        no cause, no cause

Originally published in Passages North, 1994. 



Your Scattering


Your study is a 
minefield, step wrong
and Bang! a roost
of notes takes flight
and flaps down elsewhere
on the floor.
So much “at hand,”
the way you like it,
it’s an archaeological
excavation to find
a particular gem
in the burial mound
of your files. 
Yet, today, when I
come in from some
dark thought, and put
my palm on the warm circle
of your scalp, and yours drifts
absent-mindedly to my hip,
I feel this tenderness
for your circulars and post-its,
your never-cleared bulletin
board thickening with paper
like those prayer trees
in Japan. There will be 
so much time, 
later, for neatly edged
lines. 

Originally published in Love over 60: An Anthology of Women’s Poems, ed. Robin Chapman and Jeri McCormick, Mayapple Press, 2010.