Made in Detroit (6 page)

I remember job hunting in my shoddy

and nervous working class youth,

how I had to wear nylons and white

gloves that were dirty in half an hour

for jobs that barely paid for shoes.

Don’t put down Jew
, my mother

warned,
just say Protestant, it

doesn’t commit you to anything
.

Ads could still say “white” and

in my childhood, we weren’t.

I worked in better dresses in Sam’s

cut-rate department store, $3.98

and up. I wasn’t trusted to sell.

I put boxes together, wrapped,

cleaned out dressing rooms.

My girlfriend and I bought a navy

taffeta dress with cutout top, wore it

one or the other to parties, till it failed

my sophistication test. The older

“girls” in sales, divorced, sleek,

impressed me, but the man in charge

I hated, the way his eyes stroked,

stripped, discarded. How he docked

our pay for lateness. How he sucked

on his power like a piece of candy.

A ship in a bottle looks stately

if arcane and somewhat archaic.

But two hundred people crammed

into a flying bottle breathing

filthy air is disgusting.

Come stuff your carry-on

into a mail slot so you can be

parked on the tarmac for eight

hours while the toilet overflow

runs down the aisle. Hungry?

Buy 10 stale potato chips

for six dollars. Come ride

with your knees digging hard

into your chin. When the guy

in front leans back, your tray

will slam your stomach. Fly

the germy skies inhaling TB.

The pilots have been awake

for seventeen hours and can’t

see the controls.

The plane was last serviced

by drunk mechanics who used

to fix pinball machines. Enjoy

your delayed overbooked flight

as the airlines enjoy your money.

To predict disaster, to invoke treachery

and malice, to spin tales of rotten

luck to make it not happen:

that doesn’t work.

The wind is still rising with hail

in its teeth. The waves are piling up

then spilling way, way back baring

bottom you’ve never seen.

There’s ashes in the wind, darling,

a taste of ashes in our food

ashes on our lips in bed

eyes blinded with ash.

There’s a mortgage on my spine

I cannot pay. Somebody has

bought my teeth and wants them

out tomorrow for dice.

There are real monsters under

the bed, hungry for blood. They own

the land this house stands on

to stripmine for coal.

Santa isn’t coming. The bounty

hunter is. There’s a lien on your

ass and the bank is itchy to fore

close your future.

If you’re going to stand, get up.

If you’re going to fight, get moving.

Nothing comes to those who wait

but hunger’s claws

digging into the soft belly. If you

value your blood, fight to keep

it in your veins. You have nothing

to lose but your life

and it was sold to them decades

ago by your parents’ parents.

Their greed is endless. Your

patience shouldn’t be.

“I became a feminist but I didn’t

get it all so I have committed to

the Church of Perpetual Subservience.”

“I protested, demonstrated but still

the war went on, so I have realized

politics is useless and have joined

The Junior League instead. We have

marvelous luncheons.” “I made phone

calls for my candidate but little

happened so I’ll never vote again.”

But progress is never individual.

A wave crashes on our shore, traveling

all the way from Africa, storming,

eroding the cliff, grinding it down

but the same water is not what moved.

We are droplets in a wave. Maybe

I cannot with my efforts displace

a rock but the energy of a movement

can force it from the way. Look back:

My great-grandmother was killed

in a pogrom. My grandmother gave

birth to eleven children in a tenement

eating potatoes only sometimes. My

mother had to leave school in tenth grade

to work as a chambermaid that salesmen

chased around dirty beds. Nothing

changed by itself but
was
changed by work.

History records no progress people

did not sweat and dare to push. A long

“we” is the power that moves the rock.

I like Rosh Hashanah late,

when the leaves are half burnt

umber and scarlet, when sunset

marks the horizon with slow fire

and the black silhouettes

of migrating birds perch

on the wires davening.

I like Rosh Hashanah late

when all living are counting

their days toward death

or sleep or the putting by

of what will sustain them—

when the cold whose tendrils

translucent as a jellyfish

and with a hidden sting

just brush our faces

at twilight. The threat

of frost, a premonition,

a warning, a whisper

whose words we cannot

yet decipher, but will.

I repent better in the waning

season when the blood

runs swiftly and all creatures

look keenly about them

for quickening danger.

Then I study the rock face

of my life, its granite pitted

and pocked and pickaxed,

eroded, discolored by sun

and wind and rain—

my rock emerging

from the veil of greenery

to be mapped, to be

examined, to be judged.

This is my real new year’s eve,

not that mishmash of desperate

parties with somebody puking

on your shoes or passing out,

that night when amateur drunks

crash into telephone poles

or other drivers. Here I make

my real resolutions as I toss

breadcrumbs into the Herring

River as it pours into Wellfleet

Bay. I try, but some sins,

some failures I toss year after

year and still they lurk in me.

Every Rosh Hashanah I swear

to be less impatient, then fail,

but next year, fresh and sweet

marked with honey and apples,

surely I will correct myself.

My year opens its bronze doors

and I pass through into whatever

the Book holds and whatever

I make or unmake or pass by.

I walk into this new beginning

of a self still under construction.

Head of the year and time to use

our heads: to think deeply without

subterfuge, without excuses—flaking

them off the worn bones of last

year’s resolutions.

How pitiful they look now, remnants

of kavanah more like rags than

the skeletal foundation on which

we planned to build our forceful

and gracious new year.

Every Rosh Hashanah I make

some of the same resolves. Where

does that energy leak off to? Are

they just perfunctory gestures

at this new year?

Which resolves did I start carrying

out fresh and eager and then let

slide? Which were real only on

paper, Potemkin villages of the mind,

never made new—

nice facades I didn’t truly mean to

inhabit. Tomorrow as I do tashlich

let me make no paper promises

but carry these resolves into action

in this still sweet new year.

Apples and honey for the new year

but you are my year round sweet

apple. The apple of my eye, apple

of temptation and delight. My honey:

our lives together are full of work,

harvest from dirt and sweat, bounty

of work from the brain and the heart,

we’re each other’s wages and prize:

the seeds in every apple, the flower

and the pollen and the nectar

and the final ultimate honey

our bodies make and surrender.

I was never truly happy before you.

I was never truly whole before you.

At Yizkor my dead swim around me

schools of them flashing, then

slowly as one by one I honor them.

Mother, brother, bobbah, aunts,

uncles, cousins, I am here to say

one by one silently their names.

Friends of all the times of my life,

those who left young, those whom

death took after illness ravaged them;

those whose names shine for all,

those who lived hidden by poverty,

those whom you might call ordinary

but not to those who loved them.

My cats come too, even if you

believe they lack souls. All those

I’ve loved and cherished circle

in the fading light of Yizkor and I

pray, blessed be their memories.

As long as I live let me pause to

remember, let me pay them a prayer

placed like a stone on their graves.

The hinge of the year

the great gates opening

and then slowly slowly

closing on us.

I always imagine those gates

hanging over the ocean

fiery over the stone grey

waters of evening.

We cast what we must

change about ourselves

onto the waters flowing

to the sea. The sins,

errors, bad habits, whatever

you call them, dissolve.

When I was little I cried

out I! I! I! I want I want.

Older, I feel less important,

a worker bee in the hive

of history, miles of hard

labor to make my sweetness.

The gates are closing

The light is failing

I kneel before what I love

imploring that it may live.

So much breaks, wears

down, fails in us. We must

forgive our failed promises—

their broken glass in our hands.

Near the end of our annual solstice party

as guests were rummaging through the pile

for their coats and hugging many goodbyes

the very first snow of the year began

to eddy down in big flat flakes.

It was cold enough to stick, with the grass

poking through and then buried.

Now the ground gives it back

under the low ruddy sun that sits

on the boughs of the pine like a fox

if red foxes could climb. The cats

crowd the windows for its touch.

The Wolf Moon seemed bigger than

the sun, almost brighter as last night

it turned the snow ghostly.

Now it too wanes. The nub end

of the year when all northern

cultures celebrate fire and light.

Tonight we’ll take the first two candles

to kindle one from the other.

When we go out after dark, our

eyes seek lights that bore holes

in the thick black like the pelt

of a huge hairy monster, a grizzly

who devours the warm-blooded.

We are kin with the birds who huddle

in evergreens, who crowd feeders,

kin with the foxes and their prey, kin

with all who shiver this night, home-

less or housed, clutching or alone

under the vast high dome of night.

A friend was an only child, she thought,

until sorting through her mother’s things

after the frail old woman died—who

had borne Anna late in life, a miracle,

a blessing, she was always told—

Anna found a greying photograph.

Her aunt who escaped Poland

in ’37 had saved and given it

to her younger sister who barely

survived Nordhausen working inside

the mountain, skinny almost-ghost.

Anna recognized her mother, decades

younger, but against her side was

pressed a girl not Anna. Scrawled

on the back,
Feygelah und Perl
.

Who was Feygelah? Her aunt bore

only sons. This girl was four or five

with long light braids, her legs

locked together in a shy fit. Who?

There were letters back and forth,

Boston to Krakow. She sat reading

them, puzzling out the handwriting,

the Yiddish. She had a dictionary

but even then, it took her late into

the evening. Anna had a sister.

A sister vanished into smoke.

A sister torn from her mother,

murdered, burnt. Anna sat numb.

She was the replacement for

a girl whose name her mother