My uncle was the first to disappear
in a lineage of disappearing acts.
A photo of him at his bar mitzvah

staring darkly at the camera, eyes
hoarding some abominable secret
my mother on the other side of him

seven or eight, her vision razor-sharp
from merciless stropping. The blades of life
spare no one—eventually, each of us

is butchered in one fashion or another
like Isaac on the chopping block. Her face
is stubborn and bullish, her unhappiness

targeted, precise as the crosshairs
on a rifle. She wears a mask of hatred:
for him, herself, her family, her world.

Her expression has a quality of light
about it, of an explosion taken place
a billion or so years outside her body.

Stars have died within her and been reborn
stitching their tissues across the fissures
of her phoenix heart, rising & falling

breaking & being broken without fail
by every man she’d meet. She will conceal
what happened, reveal it only in old age,

leave it for her grown children to decrypt.
What can I do with this burning message?
Read it? Destroy it? Bury it? His name 

was Jerry—short for Gerald—Prof. Emeritus
of advanced mathematics at MIT. 
That’s all we ever knew about him—that,

and this dark matter swirling in our brains
overshadowing his numinous presence,
invisible and tenebrous. Did he have 

children, unknown to us as we to them?
My grandparents sit proudly, Star of David
fluttering on the curtain behind them,

my bubbe-zayde. Their own parents, too,
grin ceremoniously as their grandson 
becomes a man under the Law of Moses.

Was he attracted to mathematics,
I wonder, as a way to abstract pain?
He would eventually disown our clan, 

sever himself entirely from us, run 
off to Germany to find a wife. The Star 
of David could not protect my mother

from one who, like David, took what he wanted 
when he wanted it. David, in love, sent
Bathsheba’s husband Uriah to the front 

to kill him off; he then usurped his wife.
In Hebrew, the Star of David is a shield,
magen-David, suggestive of protection,

safety. It offered her no such outpouring.
The only story she ever told of him
was one of brutal, naked violence. 

“He got so angry he threw a hairbrush
across the room, aimed it straight at my head.
Back then they had steel bristles, not plastic

like ones today. He was trying to kill me.
It took a chunk out of my bedroom wall.”
I grew up with that chunk of wall ingrained

in my skull, the dry weight of it crumbling
grainy as a black and white photograph.
I’d fall asleep wondering what made him

murderous. Was it what she alone knew?
Was it the fear that she would tell someone?
That was seven decades before #metoo – 

Who could she tell? Who would’ve listened to
a girl making up lies about her brother
as he crept across her delicate threshold 

into the dark jungle of his manhood?
                        

I’d Googled him a hundred times to no avail
until I conjured his cold shade into my skiff.
He appeared to me as suddenly: smiling, hale.
I parsed the details: MIT, a German wife,
his age—I added and subtracted years on years.

They matched precisely—my senses keening, ready.
I trained my vision like a scientist or seer.
Two photos—one teenaged, another edging eighty.
Was this the crooked look, the shameful fallen face
biology and chance conferred on me—to wit—

as uncle? Moved by the singular need to trace
an arc of history, to place one further dot
on the spare timeline of my shipwrecked lineage
I tossed in that ocean no pardon could assuage.