by David Lehman
now scorched to a stubborn, bleached-out gold,
the mountains incoherent without snow.
The breeze, sporadic at best, unloading cargo
just to stay afloat, quickly abandons
any pretense of carrying a scent. Only the lindens
(a whim of early dreamers on my street)
from some inner surge of altruism, conceit
or pure naiveté, choose just this instant
to loose, en masse, their all-consuming scent.
I could spend its all too brief duration
just sitting on my porch, breathing it in.
My neighbor hates it—says it’s too much—
but my Russian house cleaners used to harvest a batch
of the tiny flowers every summer for tea
prized all over Europe as a delicacy:
in French, it’s tilleul, the very tisane
that, moistening a random madeleine,
inspired Proust’s obsession with Lost Time.
It’s a main ingredient in Sleepytime
and the tè per i nervi e per insonnia
I used to drink in Italy. Tilia cordata
is the Latin name, both for tree and flower.
In England it’s lime (Coleridge’s bower
hardly a prison), its unparalleled
heart-shaped leaves the first green to unfold
in spring, in autumn, the last to fall.
But its best feature, of course, is the spell
cast by its fragrance every June.
A pity this often happens when I’m gone
doing the “research” my daughters call a scam
since it usually involves extracting a poem
from some longed-for place, or, sometimes, two.
Three years ago, in search of art nouveau,
I scoured Barcelona, Nancy, Glasgow,
and a section of Darmstadt called Mathildenhöe,
once a Jugendstil (art nouveau in German) colony.
I’d never before traveled to Germany
and though I loved each Jugendstil detail,
was perpetually uneasy, every guttural
a broken razor blade inside my mouth.
I suppose it was inevitable: the birth-
right of a Jew born in 1956
to parents still reeling from the war’s aftershocks.
I have no memory
of a time before I’d heard the word Nazi—
always sotto voce, in that nervous hiss
my mother reserved for fatal illness
or—on rare occasions—the obscene.
My earliest recollections from a screen:
Old Yeller, Walter Cronkite, Pinocchio
and piles of gaunt bodies in a backhoe,
being shoveled—human bodies—into ditches.
I badgered my mother after hearing snatches
of unassimilable whispered conversation
and wouldn’t take a shower until I was seven,
worried gas might come out. That’s what my mother
had told me: gas came out instead of water
when pressed for what those whispers meant.
Needless to say, I thought it was an accident,
that a malfunctioning shower might cause my death.
Even now, I still prefer a bath
though I know the showers themselves were not at fault.
just as—circumambulating Darmstadt,
in search of still more feats of art nouveau—
it’s not as if I didn’t know
that the people I saw around me were far too young
for incrimination, their German tongue
a way of putting things like any other.
But though I learn quickly, my entire repertoire
was ein cappuccino bitte and danke schön
and even uttering those sounds felt like treason.
I decided to go Worms—where the great Rashi
—a Rabbinic wonder—had gone to study
in the eleventh century—
a forty-minute train ride away
but, en route to the station, as I imagined
asking for the Jüdisches Museum, I turned around.
In that setting, the two-word phrase
seemed to sum up the whole dread enterprise:
reducing Jüdisches to a Museum.
I couldn’t bear to utter its name,
much less actually to go there
though I owe to Rashi my first glimmer
of the endless acrobatic feats of words,
their mutability, the daredevil speeds
with which they abolish time and distance.
He could find, behind the most straightforward utterance,
an implicit labyrinthine universe
and another behind that. (At issue was Genesis
chapter 27, verse 19:
fourth-grade Hebrew School with Mrs. Gelman.)
I didn’t need a Rashi Museum; I had his commentary.
What I needed was another history
or at least a place where mine was less conspicuous;
but my train was a day away. I wandered, aimless
till I remembered reading about a Jugendstil gate
to the park at the end of town and then forgot
architecture in a stunning crush of green
expansive trees extending on and on,
so thrilling, after years in an arid climate,
like Philly’s Fairmount Park—my father’s favorite—
where the surrounding city seemed a shrill mistake
at least to a little girl riding piggyback
through the park her father had wandered as a boy.
In Darmstadt, of all places, his fifty-year-old joy
was newly palpable, though I now wondered
if he hadn’t in fact felt a bit bewildered
at being in that spot and fully grown,
as I’ve always felt when I’ve brought my children
to my old beloved childhood haunts.
Maybe you’re more susceptible in strange environments?
How could a German park bring me my father?
But sometimes what’s familiar is so familiar
ubiquity becomes its camouflage;
you don’t distinguish it, don’t acknowledge
its presence where it doesn’t quite belong;
I’m not sure when I realized that all along
I’d been breathing in the smell of linden,
more intense than on my street, the very linden
that kept me on my porch for hours dreaming.
And while it’s not really that surprising—
isn’t Unter den Linden
the most famous thoroughfare in Berlin?—
that a huge German park would smell like linden
on the final afternoon of June,
I—unhinged already—was undone,
as if the trees themselves were in collusion
to throw me off completely. How could this
thoroughly alien, unnerving place
have anything in common with my home?
Was it a sign? If so, from whom?
And what, exactly, was it saying?
Not that it mattered. I wasn’t listening.
It was hard enough dealing with the fragrance,
much less good and evil, guilt and innocence,
which I knew—in any case—are not confined
to a single unlucky piece of land.
But the obvious wasn’t obvious in that place;
my principles—such as they were—were powerless
in the face of the matter-of-fact harmony
in evidence around me. Shouldn’t Germany
be paralyzed by its hideous statistics?
How could any person reconcile such facts
a mere sixty-eight years further on?
Still, it’s a lifetime. And we just have one.
That is, if it isn’t ripped away f
rom us.
But mine—by the narrow grace
of eleven years and (some time before that)
a shtetl subsistence so inadequate
it sent my four grandparents across an ocean—
is still intact. Surely, its duration
ought to be directed toward what’s beautiful,
my linden this very instant casting its spell,
its outspread branches almost at my porch.
And I’m here for once, within the reach
of its thick, evocative perfume,
an all-encompassing amalgam
of itself and every time I’ve breathed it in:
my daughters babies, or little children
pointing their fingers and exulting tree
then bird, then linden, then black-capped chickadee,
my ex-husband my husband and still alive
or me: disoriented, restive
bolstered by a welcome shock of green
until I realize something like this very linden
must have been attendant on atrocity.
Surely, if not in Darmstadt, then in another city
(Warsaw? Paris? Amsterdam? Berlin?)
some of those millions were smelling linden—
given the tree’s prevalence, its heavy fragrance—
as they were being herded onto trains?
My daughters have been known to make bets
before dinner parties about how many minutes
will pass before I bring up the Holocaust.
(You’re an easy target when you’re obsessed;
usually, the winning number’s about twenty.)
They’re merciless, my girls, if extremely funny
and hardly oblivious of horror.
But they really do think I’m in error;
my narrowness and bias inexcusable.
And I’m weirdly proud of their disapproval.
Let’s hope their view won’t require accommodation;
but if, in time, it does, no doubt, their children
will call them on it, as well they should.
Surely it can’t be good
to infuse one of Earth’s loveliest offerings—
a linden tree in June—with human beings
at their very basest. Something’s wrong with me.
Not to mention that my reasoning is faulty.
No one in that appalling circumstance
could pay any attention to a fragrance
and even if they did, who’s to say
whether it caused—by brutal contrast—agony
or offered, one last time, a tiny balm?
It’s so far beyond me. I’m safe at home
breathing in the fragrance from my tree,
an exquisite, if no longer entirely
untroubled or uncomplicated pleasure.
But doesn’t every good thing have its measure
of imperfection lurking in the wings?
The glass we’re obliged to break at weddings
to acknowledge the Holy Temple’s destruction?
In a world this damaged, this out of proportion,
what remains untouched? Nothing at all.
Still, who can blame me if I stay awhile?
It can’t last too much longer, this perfume,
but here, just now, my linden tree’s in bloom.
from The Antioch Review
MIKE OWENS
* * *
Sad Math
My last cellmate had only a fifth-grade education.
His name was Larry
and he had undiagnosed dyslexia and developmental delays.
He reminded me of my big sister DeeDee, who died
long before I understood the futility
of blaming the sick for being ill.
Larry liked to play a game I couldn’t stand,
but I felt sorry for him, so I would play along.
“Celly,” he’d call, “they take 55% for restitution, right?”
“Yeah,” I’d reply.
“And my papers say I owe $9,000 right?”
“Yeah.”
“So if my family sends me $1,500, how much that leaves me?”
Closing my eyes, I do the math.
“$675”
“That should take care of me for awhile, right Celly?”
“Yeah, Larry, that will last you awhile.”
After that, Larry would get quiet, settle back on his bunk
and stare at our empty lockers with a simple little smile.
I knew he was imagining what they would look like full.
Sometimes he’d fill out commissary lists for the prison store,
the care package ordering forms,
revising them daily, weighing his choices at just below a whisper.
The amounts Larry wanted and calculated varied a lot
but were always outrageous: two, six, ten thousand dollars.
I pretended I didn’t notice that his family never wrote,
and that he never received any packages or money.
from The Way Back
ELISE PASCHEN
* * *
The Week Before She Died
I dream us young, again,
mother and daughter back
on 69th Street inside
our old brownstone—across
from the church, patch of lawn—
a house neglected, wrecked,
as if the family
had been forced at gunpoint
to move away. In corners
dirt stacked like minuscule
anthills; along the edges
of room—crumpled clothes, bodiless;
littered across the floor
dry-cleaning bags, vestiges
of what they once protected.
A Turkish scarf, embroidered
with sequins, glitter, beads,
tantalizes. My mother
holds it close, says, “You should
wear it.” The doorbell rings.
At the top of the stairs
he waits for us to answer.
My mother’s ballet partner,
Russian, stows something covert
behind his almond eyes. With three
regal strides he commands
our gaze, pronounces the red
brocade robe his, lofts high
the scarf, the sash he flung
in Giselle, circling the empty
living room. With mischief he bows
low before my mother. Her love
for him, a mountain. The doorbell
chimes. A blond, blue-eyed dancer,
in epaulets, arrives.
She straightens shoulders, turns,
walks away. Rudy asks
Erik, “Did you ever tell her
about us?” No response. The secrets
men keep, my mother knows.
from Virginia Quarterly Review
JESSICA PIAZZA
* * *
Bells’ Knells
My hands fold again and again into prayer shapes:
a steeple, an angel, your face’s sharp angles. You strung
all our hopes from the rafters of structures: this gothic,
that Catholic, this cracked brick, that basement.
Your promise: a ticking, a lingering wish
that persists on each altar, each future that falters.
You did the exalting. God did the exacting. Redacting
your afternoons, vestments and basements; your words
cold and keyhole, steel and exact. A harp’s not real singing,
this dirge never could hold you back, and the church just
a beautiful stack of shellacked, painted marble
and wood. What good that we’re here, singing hymns,
when in weeks or in months you’ll recall that ripe
fruit in the mouth is worth salt in the wound.
We both knelt at the pew.
We both knew we were doomed.
from Smartish Pace
AARON POOCHIGIAN
* * *
Happy Birthday, Herod
Like always, Herod’s birthday is today,
and I can hear the tambourine
brioso. I can hear the oboe skirl.
Like always, Salome
is getting down to business, veil by veil.
Her eyes are green;
all other eyes, obscene
ravishers of a writhing girl,
are piercing what is see-through anyway.
Like always, without fail,
something repulsive has been done:
under the Dead Sea sun
another sort of flesh
(that corpse I mean, the headless one)
is summoning the blowflies—fresh
gratification for a mother’s grudge.
Like always, who am I to judge?
Indifferent to whatever moral thing
a servant might be carrying
around the party on a tray,
I stand with stiff voyeurs
devouring those curves of hers,
worshipping the elastic,
the orgastic,
Salome.
Forgive me: Herod’s birthday is today.
from The New Criterion
RUBEN QUESADA
* * *
Angels in the Sun
after Turner
I would have waited alone a thousand
years for the coming of angels,
blinding bright as the spring sun to arrive,
to abandon this world for another.
Stunned by their flashing lights aflame
across the bow of their space craft—landing
lights for that world. Herds of animals:
horses, humans, and fish fixed.
The angels approached.
Come angels! Come beasts!
Men and women cried out
to each other; the angels cried;
some were lost between their earthly life
and paradise and what is paradise, anyway?
Few imagined being bound to this world;
blue halo of emerald mountains;
extraordinary, ordinary—they rose,
a crucifixion yardarm flying away.
from The American Poetry Review
ALEXANDRA LYTTON REGALADO
* * *
La Mano
For the more than 60,000 children from Central