[When didn’t I know]
When didn’t I know about the ashes, the attack dogs. We breathed it
in & out like gray moths beating on smudged glass. Numbers
cheaply inked in the butcher’s arm who sliced kosher beef
for my father. The war ended, grass grew back over pits
outside Kiev. Marcu walked toward Harry with his arms out
in Yiddish on a train platform. But Harry only stared. On rails
trains paused huffing steam or coal smoke lacing human time
& place together. After 40 years Marcu walking towards his brother.
The air we breathed cracked like old sidewalks. Time laced with rails
running east from Amsterdam to hell. The butcher was round-faced
& bald & sliced meat for us kindly. His forearm tattooed as if
in a dim room or the dark. Harry my grandfather died like the air.
Neither Marcu nor his seven other siblings would I meet, so I climbed
until branches tapered & swayed with my weight & their needles.
[Black & white lines like tundra]
Black & white lines like tundra, I read the static. Studied both
sides of the cereal box. No-one there telling me the stories
like shoes someone had worn out & tossed. One great-grandmother
I never met was Ida from the Pale, the Spanish Flu. Or mother’s
mother Eva & her heart attack & what part of the hand she hit with,
my mother, or how they came to this land thinking milk & honey.
Their stories in the ground & mine didn’t begin or end it just persisted
past train-flattened pennies, brown bottles in the weeds. Pages
in the weeds of skin & gloss stuck together, radiating trouble.
Across bedsheet lawns & dotted lines of walkways the maple pods
helicoptered, dried brown ghost stories spinning down. Wind
discussing what was left with the leaves, until they did. How had we
come here, who died so we could? Ida died in 1919. A paperback
on the table said Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. I did.
[Like London Bridges she was]
Like London Bridges she was falling, like ashes, like Paul Bunyan
American hero for felling the untouched forest, like his flailing axe
her eyes flew. & blunted. Into forests in the fairy tale went the children
where shadows panted, licked their lips. So we boxed her up, set her
on a porch & fled 75 MPH down Hwy 80 with shadows beaten flat
& running after us on hot asphalt. My dimestore Instamatic
snapped washy blue horizons through window-glass & thumb,
wind coming or going in faded green Wyoming. Like memory,
an album of wind & blur. Shoebox of folk music in my lap through
Iowa, Illinois, song after song & motels. Back of the squareback
packed with her coleuses & wandering Jews in their straining pots,
which we unpacked to look for light under another roof in Boston
where she bought me a blue bike with removable crossbar so it was
lighter, when it spun down the quarry hill, my weight almost wind.
Dan Alter’s poems, reviews, and translations have been published in journals including Field, Fourteen Hills, and Zyzzyva; his first collection My Little Book of Exiles won the Poetry Prize for the 2022 Cowan Writer’s Awards. A volume of his translations Take a Breath, You’re Getting Excited, from the Hebrew of Yakir Ben-Moshe, will be published by Ben Yehuda Press at the end of 2024, and Hills Full of Holes, a second collection of poems, by Fernwood in 2025. He lives with his wife and daughter in Berkeley. He can be found online at danalter.net.
Image: aaihs.org
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Heavy Feather Review 