Yes, dear departed, cherished days,
   Could Memory’s hand restore
Your morning light, your evening rays
   From Time’s gray urn once more,—
Then might this restless heart be still,
   This straining eye might close,
And Hope her fainting pinions fold,
   While the fair phantoms rose.

But, like a child in ocean’s arms,
   We strive against the stream,
Each moment farther from the shore
   Where life’s young fountains gleam;—
Each moment fainter wave the fields,
   And wider rolls the sea;
The mist grows dark,—the sun goes down,—
Day breaks,—and where are we?

Past Storrow Drive, over the Mystic
River Bridge, my father lived in Chelsea—

home to Katz’s two-step bagel, to perpetually
broken sidewalks. A minor chord

in an immigrant tale—feral curls,
thirdhand coat—my dad looks

into the me he cannot imagine.
His eyes and hips glitter as he stands

against the glass of the family’s corner shop.
After school, working wordlessly beside his father—

leased, not owned—he would repeat—
a livelihood soon-to-fail from unpaid credit

for kosher spam and a carton of eggs. My father gazes
towards me like a cinema darling in a Jewish saga

of fire escapes, flashy dance numbers, suicides.
He becomes a mechanical engineer

who will not be called when his mother dies,
who will never dial his sister’s number again.

My father will build his life from a mountain of questions
without an answer key, a footnote

with an alphabet all his own: part Russian,
part Yiddish, part loss. In the city

that abuts Boston—infamous for bankruptcy,
for the erasures of old countries—his heart tried.

Tonight, I search the photograph
to detect again his history—the plagues

of bewilderment—the tracks that follow
me through the unseen branches

of our family tree; faded patterns of light
and dark, ascending.

Through predictive analytics I understood the inevitability of the caged-up babies
 
They keep coffins at the border for when the refugees get too far from home
 
How many thousands of bodies can we fit in a tent or a swimming pool
 
We can live without the unknown in front of us if we keep enough babies in cages
 
The cardboard box sleeps one kid comfortably
 
Two is snug   efficient   recommended in times of austerity

Relational values change in relation to market sentiments

This is the danger of having too much access to illegal bodies
 
Let’s pretend the illegal bodies are bankers
 
Let’s stick all the bankers in cages
 
Let’s shove shit in their mouths
 
Let’s pretend they are eating cryptocurrency
 
Let’s create a crisis let’s induce inflation
 
Let’s undervalue the cost of their bodies

I dream of an economy where one arrested immigrant is replaced with one dead banker
 
I am not responsible for my dreams rather I am responsible for what I do with my dreams
 
When the sleep medication wears off I am alone with the machines that watch me	
 
The global economy brightens my room with the surveillance of my rotten assets

I’m trying to forgive my friend
who arrives like a bleeder
in an ambulance.

I should minimize
my exposure, as to a bad
virus or too much sun.

I’m always the shadow,
the “local talent,” sweeping
the floor, feting her

even when my new baby
had just come home.
I was gulping

cranberry ginger ales
in dazed thirst to restore
myself as she uncorked

another dark-green bottle,
put her thumb
in the deep punt

of the heavy bell-shaped
bottom, and poured herself
more red.

For Stella

I dreamt we were already there.
Some things were right
and some were not.

And somehow Tuesday
was Wednesday
was Monday again.

I slept then woke
and then fell asleep again
and when I slept again

I dreamt we were already there.
Things were right some
and were some not.

My father died yesterday, she said.
Yesterday, some things were and.
Today some are not.

My skeleton,
you who once ached
with your own growing larger

are now,
each year
imperceptibly smaller,
lighter,
absorbed by your own
concentration.

When I danced,
you danced.
When you broke,
I.

And so it was lying down,
walking,
climbing the tiring stairs.
Your jaws. My bread.

Someday you,
what is left of you,
will be flensed of this marriage.

Angular wristbone's arthritis,
cracked harp of ribcage,
blunt of heel,
opened bowl of the skull,
twin platters of pelvis—
each of you will leave me behind,
at last serene.

What did I know of your days,
your nights,
I who held you all my life
inside my hands
and thought they were empty?

You who held me all my life
inside your hands
as a new mother holds
her own unblanketed child,
not thinking at all.

—2013