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Yerra Sugarman USA
Her Hands Instead of words tiny in a nightgown my mother spoke Dying with her hands And with ocean-eyes violet as friction between water and sky her stare pleated the air the skirt she was sewing to neatly die in the quiet she pressed and smoothed It wasn’t that I didn’t take care of her but how could I have learned how to save her —An unpublished poem from her new manuscript Glass. A French translation by Jean Migrenne is forthcoming in Siecle 21. Night Watch, Or: The Putting Out of What Was Fire with the Barely-Brushed Watercolor of the Daughter Comes her soul, Lord, leaking. My mother’s outline loosening, vanishing… The soul oozing, there’s no sufficient patch for. Night presses its face against the windows. A speech of rain. Something—you, Lord?— rubs the lines of her, blurring them. (Who’ll speak to me after? Whose sentences touch mine and chime like the sailboats that sway late- night on the glinting onyx of the Hudson?) Something kneading her, scumbles her edges into else. Her colors staining, softening to space: a grape to wine. Her eyes hang on a branch of a tree that grows in the space her colors travel to. (Where is it, Lord? Take me there.) The irises spores now. They will be seeds. Along a hem I can’t see, her gaze climbing, leaving me. (I would hoist myself on it, Lord, be an alpinist, palms callused and scathed. We would be saved.) Out of the bed, I lift her: eyns, tsvey, dray. Into the bed, I guide her back: fir, finf, zeks. Still, I cannot tell her the Yiddish for “pancreas.” Comb her hair; keep strands of in sandwich bags. Reveal to no one, Lord: I grow Siamese. Yesterday, we watched narcissi cut purple through the snow-pleated flagstones. Months before, outside the operating room, on a gurney, the surgeon penned her belly with blue. If God, the throat an ocean. If human, held up to light to scream mid-air. I’m sick of being an arch in this arcade. Like stars, she becomes a planet fiercely, her body glowing behind a dark veil, the weave of which diffuses her, so she is no longer where flesh meets us, no longer hoarfrost wreath of hair, no longer cancer’s fragile and beautiful. Who will dangle, Lord, from your sky-thumb, a vessel for your finding? As with waves, with heat, what breaks begins, what’s dashed upon the rocks multiplies. The body scattered, knowing itself by wanting. But I’ll plod to win, Lord, slip her one arm through, then the other. You’ll see, then, how flesh becomes her. I part her lips. Rub morphine between the teeth. Narcotics stick to the skin. Chicken soup through a dropper, Lord, mashed potatoes, too. Vitamins with a straw. Coke-cola, coke-cola… The human chafing, a bending stem. Salt tastes like honey, Lord, honey like brine. Still she claps to song, wishes dancing. Dances. Because I believe some things sacred, so I abandon them, Lord. In art school I learned the virtues of the clean line, the hard-edge, a clarity achieved by tape. Why is this not clear, Lord, not taped, not clean? Why do I picture this now: the hole carved out, a traveling cesspool in the center of her cattle-car from Lvov to Siberia, where she sewed dresses for the camp doctor’s girlfriend? When she cannot breathe, I scream, “in,” “out,” arayn, aroys. Who said I knew how to do this, Lord? Who said? When she cannot speak, she threads the air, the dust of her stare, with her finger, pointing from her blue eye to my brown one, from my brown to her blue, back and forth, Lord. And where are you now that it is spring, rain spilling from the eaves? My mother’s drenched and sick with the smell of yearning. The daughter lives, Lord, though the mother does not call. Flesh the obstacle. Flesh between them. What, then, is the greater betrayal: the skin into spirit, or the spirit into skin (to begin)? To begin… —An unpublished poem from her new manuscript Glass. Notes: Eyns, tsvey, dray, is Yiddish for one, two, three. Fir, finf, zeks is Yiddish for four, five, six. What-I-think-is Don’t ask how I began to love women. —Adrienne Rich, “Inscriptions” The night has hung its moon up to dry, the blue-black moon. Its fingers are ether. I saw you and knew what? What I had given up? I am taking down notes about us.... I have to make do with these pages as ligatures for loss. The shadow my hand becomes interests me more than my hand’s flesh and skin. What binds the real, and us to it? Revoked from the now, you and I are still shapes where somewhere lost shapes persist. I can’t imagine a place we could completely disappear to. The electric cord inflects the chair. I listen to air, the what-I-think-is, trying hard not to overwhelm myself. My face burns, the back of my neck also. I hear the elevator rising If I was right then, do I think I know what I want now? I think I do, I think I know: the hand, the real hand. —An unpublished poem from her new manuscript Glass. To Miklós Radnóti Radnóti was a well-known Hungarian poet, whose “body was exhumed from a mass grave in 1946. His widow, going through his pockets, discovered a notebook full of [his] poems.”* My mind throws its crumbs into the night’s stopped river. This is its ceremony to cast off sin, to become pure, What we Jews call Tashlich, an emptying of pockets. Night’s dark darkened by the museum of human ash, its lights switched off. The stars’ corollas stammer and, muzzled by clouds, vanish. A spot of blood throbs under God’s moony thumbnail. I would like you to know our foundations for burning flesh have not yet been razed. I pay their victims homage by day’s inebriated bright. But understand, I still love the glass scent given off by groves of lemon. I gladly feel the olive trees’ arthritic branches pulsing in my knees. And despite everything, I participate in the crime of music. My body still an instrument, strums its many forms of abandonment. (Although I ask you whether what’s truly ephemeral can be abandoned.) My lips, after passion, scrape like leaves along pavement, incoherent, tarrying… Yes, my mind flings crusts into the night’s taut river. And I see by the moon’s weak lamp, it’s as flat as the bottom of a pot. The night so motionless, it seems an inertia devised by angels or devils, Who pull on it from both ends. The night’s surface like a trampoline, resistant, rubber. And so, my sins fly back at me. They splash my face like spindrift, leaving river on my lips. They reenter me through my eyes and teeth, As my mind rears up, a wild horse. For I understand, you were murdered by hands like mine. And I understand I am helpless, a reveler at the table of the void, A pilgrim who’s journeyed only to discover herself. And I’m ashamed to speak you or read the poems you shine on my skin. And the sky does not kindly let me empty my pockets. —From her new manuscript Glass. First published in 100 Poets Against the War. A French translation by Jean Migrenne is forthcoming in Europe. Notes: * From Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, ed. Carolyn Forché Tashlich means “cast off.” It’s a ceremony that takes place during the Jewish New Year. People gather at a body of water and empty into it crumbs from their pockets. This symbolizes a ridding of sins. Because There were days the color of numbers, of runny ink marks on the arms, the color of iris and storm, of cattle brand. When I was small, I thought some people come numbered. There was the silent ticking of stars, their clear constant trails, memories floating up from nowhere: Gedenkst du? Remember? He was a socialist before the war. Gey shoyn. Go on…There were stories from the Torah, a Sabbath candelabra (the one thing saved). Why? Because our minds are like planted fields. Candy dishes of crystal, rose and blue, bone china, a bad painting of the Champs Élysées (purchased with care) the people in it just a few quick brushstrokes. Kosher bakery cookies, tea served in glass cups, its darkness lightened by wheels of lemon. There were the swirling rhythms of the Bible. When you pray you should move your lips. Why? Because God must hear each word. You should shuckle back and forth, sway. Why? Because the spirit of man is a candle. There was the rush to Yizkor services when children were hushed and filed out of the sanctuary. Why? Because the dead are asked to intercede. Early cherry blossoms pawed the suburban fences. Crocuses speared through late snow where we found ghost boot-holes, paths that made you know someone had lived before and now you were taking their place. The voices of my parents and their friends hard as iron, soft as pulp. The languages they spoke pellets of hail against a window. I met him in the camp, in lager. Prosze Pani, please Madam, take more cake. Bardzo ladny. Very good. He looked like a Pole, that’s how he survived. Beautiful dress! To jest piekna, Pani Regina. Sheyn. She ran from one hiding place to another. That’s why she’s so nervous. Dziekuje bardzo. A sheyeim dank. Thank you very much. What I still don’t understand—the simultaneity: beauty fringing horror, the everyday lined like a coat with the fabric of the extraordinary. A glitter of lakes, the plush of trees alongside the route of freight trains from Drancy to Auschwitz. On Deportation Convoy 23, there was a girl with my name, my name exactly, just another language. Convoy, I look up the meaning: To accompany on the way for protection. A protecting force. There were skies opalescent as the insides of oyster shells, clouds like schools of newly hatched fish. Some of the children were listed only by number. Why? Because the infants were too young to say their names. Why? Because there was light reaching through the ribs of the library chairs. Because there was light. —From Forms of Gone (The Sheep Meadow Press, 2002) Notes: Some lines are quoted from Serge Klarsfeld’s French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial Exhibition and Alfred J. Kolatch’s The Jewish Book of Why. Several words and phrases are in Yiddish and Polish. Shuckle refers to the Jewish custom of swaying during prayer. Yizkor is a prayer recited for one’s deceased family.
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