Okay, let’s get some things straight once and for all. I don’t live in a shoe. It’s a work of modern architecture, a quite normal if unusual looking home,, and if you imagine it shoe-like, so be it. I’m not old, I’m 45, but with eight kids I am prematurely gray. It wasn’t broth I fed them that night, it was a rich Pottage. And no there wasn’t any bread, six of them are celiac intolerant. And I’d hardly call a pat on the back reminding them of bedtime a serious whipping.
Say what you will about
this modern age, beset with,
well, it’s probably far easier
to list what it is not beset with,
but there are things from my youth
that I do not miss at all.
Like the copper molds that home
on the kitchen wall, one the shape
of a lobster, another an ornate ring.
They were strange but reasonably
decorative items, but when
they were taken down to serve
their intended purpose they
were the source of my chagrin
as mother carefully mixed the Jell-O
and poured it into the mold
never getting the proportions quite right,
leaving us to smile wantonly over
gummy cherry lobster bits
or lemon gel with some sort
of tasteless whipped topping.
The weight of mourning defies precise measurement,
and all of the rules of mathematics fail in an attempt.
Grief rejects being placed on scales, there is never
a moment of pure equilibrium, only a teetering
that always threatens to bring it all down in a heap.
A million who are nameless and faceless is an agony
and yet eighty thousand with names on white walls
of the ancient synagogue in Prague seem
to weigh as heavy or heavier on the heart,
and the youngest of those taken are the heaviest
a burden almost too great to bear,
no lighter for our freely flowing tears.
And yet a woman, nameless, faceless
and dead a dozen years, who I knew as my mother
but nothing more, save odd facts that insured
it would be all I would ever know, that woman
was a crushing burden, but one I had to bear alone
and did, if barely, until the moment
when by twist of fate and DNA, she had a name
and soon thereafter a face, and as I stared at her,
as I stared, too, at the mirror, the hole she left,
that emptiness grew vast and heavy, and I
must now struggle not to collapse beneath it.
First appeared in Peacock Journal, February 2017
https://peacockjournal.com/louis-faber-three-poems/
Death has an uncanny knack
for turning normalcy on its head.
My mother was never ready
at the time my parents had to leave
either selecting outfits
or jewelry, the right shoes,
as my father stood by fidgeting
and looking at his watch,
knowing better than to say anything.
Yet she left without notice,
no delays at all, just suddenly gone
so unlike her to make a simple exit.
And he, the man who was always
punctual, who left at the exact
moment planned save for her issues,
he lingered, a slow departure
by inches, fading away, until
only a shell of the man remained
and that, too, finally slipped away.
I cannot say for certain which day
I became the familial isotope,
but I know my parents began
accreting neutrons not long
after their marriage, bound
to their mutual core, unbound
from me, adopted into the family,
and I then became the isotope
of the family but remote,
easily enough forgotten,
when I was not present.
That is, I suppose, one possible
fate for an isotope, it’s familial
half-life up and then forgotten.
But perhaps it was just
that I was the family’s
Schrödinger’s cat, finally put
in a box into which
no one chose to look.
There was a ghost
or two for a short while,
that lived under my bed
when I was three or four.
My mother said they
were not real, she couldn’t
see them when she looked,
so they were all in my mind.
I had to tell her that you
don’t ever actually see ghosts,
you just know they are there
because you sense their presence.
Mother’s ghost visited me
last night in my dreams, but
I reminded her that she didn’t
believe ghosts exist, and returned
to the dream she interrupted
and she . . . oh I don’t know what
she did, but she wasn’t there
and I suspect will not return,
which is entirely fine by me.
He was the smallest, that
is what drew you to him.
Still, he had a certain bravado
a serious strut to his walk.
Perhaps it was because
his father was there, a protector
in part, in another part a challenge.
He knew his mother was looking
so it became a matter of pride.
He could imagine himself
a father one day, his own children
trailing behind him threatening
to break away, knowing full well
they were not ready yet, needed
him for protection from
the always present predators.
That was life in the wetland
for most wading birds,
the only life he knew or wanted.
With knowledge comes something
but I cannot remember what
my mother told me it was, or
perhaps it was a teacher
who said it, but I can’t hope
to tell which one it was, I
cannot remember some
of their names or in what grade
it might have been said.
I don’t think it was in college
or graduate school since by then
it was assumed we knew
what came with knowledge.
So I am left to look around me,
and see what the knowledgeable
have wrought and consider that
perhaps with knowledge comes
chaos for we have quite enough
of that, or a lack of compassion,
we’re big on that one, so maybe
with knowledge come a hidden
key to making this all right, but
I cannot for the life of me find it.
I wasn’t born a woman,
I cannot bear a child,
I cannot carry a fetus nine months
I cannot feel the morning sickness,
I cannot nurse a child once born,
I cannot cease to be who I am
because I had a child,
I cannot be raped and made pregnant,
I cannot be subject incest
making me pregnant,
I cannot go through the pains of labor,
I cannot have an emergency c-section,
But as a man
I can sit in judgment on women
I can try and control their bodies,
I can try and eliminate their choices,
I can do all of those things
but I refuse for I was born
of a woman, and I honor
her right to choose what is best
for her as I reserve the right
to choose what is best for me.
I am a distant grandchild
of saints and Herod,
kings and lords, and
Visigoths for good measure.
That half of me is
woven of ever thinner
branches on a tree
that threatens to topple
from the lightness
of its other side, roots
deep in the rich soil
of Lithuania, the roots
hitting bedrock, and
the branches stunted
and there a simple
Ashkenazi Jew.
an old writer and his words 