my grandmother's bed
How she pulled it out of the wall
to my amazement. How it rattled and
creaked, how it sagged in the middle
and smelled like a used-clothing store.
I was ecstatic to be sleeping on wheels!
It rolled when I moved, it trembled
when she climbed under the covers
in her flannel nightgown, kissing me
softly on the head, turning her back.
Soon I could hear her snoring next to me.
Her clogged breath roaring in my ears,
filling her tiny apartment like the ocean.
Until I, too, finally swayed and slept
while a radiator hissed in the corner
and traffic droned on Lawrence Avenue . . .
I woke up to the color of light pouring
through the windows, the odor of soup
simmering in the kitchen, my grandmother's
face. It felt good to be ashore again
after sleeping on rocky, unfamiliar waves.
my grandfather's poems
I remember that he wrote them backwards,
in Yiddish, in tiny, slanting, bird-like lines
that seemed to rise and climb off the page
in a flurry of winged letters, mysterious signs.
Scrupulously he copied them out
on the inside covers of his favorite books
while my sister and I romped through the house
acting like cops and robbers, cowboys and crooks,
whooping, shouting, and gunning each other down
in the hallway between rooms, mimicking fright,
staggering from wall to bloody wall before
collapsing in wild giggles at his feet.
Always he managed to quiet us again,
kissing us each on the upper part of the arm,
tucking us in . . . we never said prayers,
but later I could hear him in the next room
talking to himself in a low, tearing whisper.
All I could fathom was a haunted sound
like a rushing of waves in the distance,
or the whoosh of treetops in the back yard.
For years I fell asleep to the rhythm
of my grandfather's voice rising and falling,
filling my head with his lost, unhappy poems:
Those faint wingbeats, that hushed singing.