Of course, I thought my mathematician Dad
was the source of my school smarts,
all those A’s first grade through grad school.
Yet here in my uncle’s memoirs - 
Lillian the funny sister, and Clara, 
the smart one. Clara, my mother,
who smoothed hurt feelings
like she ironed wrinkles from my father’s
shirts, but never went to college, started
work in the bargain basement 
at fifteen pretending she was twenty, 
married and escaped into homemaking,
led Girl Scout camping trips
and baked chocolate chip cookies.
I mocked her in my teenage years
for how ardently she redid the kitchen
in a palette of mauve and faux fern. 

The smart one. All that time I was satisfied
with a simple language and now I know
I needed one with twenty words for snow, 
or one that spells mother six different ways, 
and I’m sitting again at her kitchen table
that morning she mused about the gifted class
she loved in second grade, but they moved
for the third time and anyway, she tells me,
she was just a little girl. Then she folds her yellow
flowered apron and steps aside, as she
always did, to let everyone else’s life 
parade along the crowded pavement, 
while she smiled and waved and cheered us on.

He thought emotions beyond Hallmark greetings 
floated in a magnetic field only entered
by women. When I wrote him a love poem
days before he died, he responded, Your mother
will like that. But he was the one who taught me
to play with words, who said char-acter 
for character, pronouncing the ch as in child, 
who named the rolled donut I was afraid to eat 
borushnuck –made it silly enough I tried it.
He encircled me with secret syllables
every night at bedtime, began with Here’s
the biggest baddest bear hug, and grew 
alliterative lines year after year to celebrate
my deep daring dives, proud pinochle player. 
He learned to say hello and thank you
in the mother tongue of every waitress and store clerk, 
kept index cards in his jacket pocket to guide 
his pronunciation. At work he spoke the language 
of equations, radar signals, mathematical models, 
linear transformations. From him I learned that a line
is the shortest way to connect two points, 
a line of poetry, two people.