The blind side of a run-down apartment house
in the rain-dark movie street,
puddles sheened by street-lamps,
surprises me with longing
unrelated to the plot—

And all the next day I think of 
the backs of tenements—so unlike
the “garden apartments” my mother
yearned for—turning empty eyes to the tracks
as the El rumbled out of the station: 
open windows, half-pulled shades,
yellow curtains blowing out, a towel
hanging to dry…

Here, in these suburban streets
bleached by Western sun, where stillness
lies down like shadows
in the deep afternoons,
 
what do I miss 
when I think I miss striations
of fire escapes, of El girders
leaning across the mottled
sidewalks, the blur 
of subway cars, pour
from doors?
            
Is it the marble atriums
of desired quiet, dripping slow
and cool as fountains, guarded
by doormen I was once
too class-shy to approach—
the very dream
of some success to come?
      
Or walking down my own
mottled street in a rhapsody-
in-blue joyous swell because
it was my first, my own?

Sometimes I dream 
of waking
at low-cloud level, bird
flight-path level, 
my bed suspended
in air.

Or of the evening’s flocks
of lights thrilling up like sudden
ground as a plane banks.

Sometimes I want for one night,
all night, to hear the city’s white noise—
like a soothing watchful body
lying close, 
or the hum of the universe—speaking to
the young—itself.

The bent-backed zeide,
newly moved in after
grandma died, enters his grandson’s
toy-filled room after school—the parents
not yet home—where the boy’s arranging
action figures on a shelf.
Wrapping spindly fingers around the boy’s
thin upper arm, he pulls it to him
and kisses the warm flesh—smelling like
sun-baked grass—as he kissed the edge
when he donned his prayer shawl
for his morning prayers. But with more fervor—age
to youth, old country to
the new. His hazel eyes
crinkle and melt. 

His beard and moustache are white,
with discolored yellow whiskers—
from his food?— and his lips are a little
wet; the boy thinks of the bristles
on a walrus snout. He is embarrassed 
to be made a sort of god, 
and flattered as if it were deserved,
and not sure what
the qualifications are. 

But what to do with his anointed
and immobilized right arm, still
clutching a soldier in khaki uniform?
His grandfather’s zeal is unreadable
as the characters in his prayer
books, his worship is so private 
and complete that the boy cannot
pull his arm away, but waits, 
squeezing shut his eyes to resist
tugging down his sleeve
to rub the wetness off.

Zeide is Yiddish for “grandfather”