Note: Naches (נחת) is a Yiddish word that means "pride" or "joy." Typically naches refers to the pride or joy that a child brings a parent.
​Names of My Mother's Friends

​
They touched knees on stoops, girlishly
coquettish, hung laundry together
on wind-scoured roofs, smiled at me
fit to burst, her naches theirs, yahooed hello
as I dragged home from school, pinched 
my cheeks red because they loved her,
removed slipcovers at the end
of summer, lovingly preserved grandmothers'
antimacassars, leaned on the sills 
of evening. 

They rumbled their shopping carts
over cracked sidewalks, met in the
vegetable store by the dank potatoes,
cluck-clucked over this one's 
sunken-cheeked husband, that one's 
sneaky son, while the chickens
they chose were plucked; 

grew widowed, cancerous, forgot which was
the meat fork, which the dairy,
lost teeth and didn't care, moved
out of and into a home, 

and their names have been sent down to the dark,
withdrawn from circulation, with hers
they have gone out like lights, 
but they are still fragrant 
as lace handkerchiefs taken
from a sachet-scented drawer— 
Oh Stella, Dora, Ida, Gertie, Pearl, oh Rose.

First published in Poetry International 2 (1998).



The Withering of Their State
     And all that believed were together, and had all things common. - Acts 2: 44

In the end they lose all
their chains and ghost and swirl
by each other in the closed
bubble of the "reminiscence"
wing like flakes of snow
in an upended souvenir globe.

In the end they wander in
the deserts of each other's
synonymous small rooms, 
their possessions winnowed
like so much chaff in a chill
breeze, sold by
beleaguered daughters, parted 
to Goodwill—the leavings squeezed
in with the new twin bed: one table,
one uneasy chair, the old TV
they have forgotten how to turn on.

And in the end no-one among them
lacks, for if one sits shivering
on the toilet, where the attendant
has deposited him, dreaming and
losing a dream of dry warmth
like a distant bell, the groaning wardrobe
of his roommate may yet open unto him.

And in the end the scales fall
from their eyes, and they fall asleep
in each other's chairs, and thine
is mine, and now is then, and mildly,
with the most gracious of oh?s,
they allow themselves to be
removed, guided away by their pliant
elbows, by those who still live
in the bordered world. 

First published in The Women’s Review of Books 20, No. 9 (June, 2003), 



In the Reminiscence Wing


When your father cries
the kite-tail of pink-cheeked
skaters is whipped
around the bend
by an unseen
hand, and they all
fall down on black ice,
like dead soldiers.

When your father cries

red-toothed, red-clawed
stuffed toys crawl out of the
picture books, like
evil first amphibians.

Trees bend and buckle and thrash
that held up the glowering sky
when your father cries.

When your father cries

the sentinel statue 
at the prow of the park— 
marble-shouldered in hail
and flurry—closes his eyes
on the watch you didn't realize
consoled you, on your round
home at dusk.

When your father cries

you hand him the handkerchief
he always kept in his breast
pocket—masculinity's last
nattiness, starched, arranged
like a drooping flower— 

and stroke his bald head
and hold his head to your chest,
and the sun plummets down
from the sky
while your father cries. 
    
First published in The Women’s Review of Books 20, No. 9 (June, 2003).



The Imaginary Doctors


take your hands into their own
raw, rough ones—humbled 
by boiling the hospital
linens—red stars bursting
at the nailquicks of nervous
sympathy. They lie down
beside you on the cold tile
floor, by the still waters. 
They shepherd your removal
into spacious, newly remodeled
Green Pastures. They take
patient lessons in the lip-sync
of the terminally in terror. 
                
The messages on their machines
sprout wings like the transfigured
hearts in centuries-old emblems
and ascend until the single pyramidical 
eye of the doctor blinks them
in.
            
In the operating theater
they take no bows. 
            
Their silent emissary 
bends his young head
as you drive by the window
of the Kwik-View Funeral Parlor.

They bring expensive roses
to the sickroom of your heart,
they come from vast distances,
they pour the milk of space
into pitchers for your bedside table. 
And when you are shaking
in the anteroom of the abyss, they,
and not their attendant
choirs, bring warmed blankets
which they tuck around you,
and, like your dead mother,
spit twice, and kiss your forehead.

First published in Poetry International 6 (2002).



After General Anaesthesia


When you ask me why I am
whimpering, I want to
tell you it is not
pain, really, but a
recognition of the returned
body’s capacity for it,
and for pleasure, too, pain’s bright
flipped coin— 
as I twist back down into sleep,
moaning sweetly,
taking the roll call
of my body’s sinews,
counting over its currency
in the dark. 

First published in The Montserrat Review No. 7 (2003).