February

Ira Sadoff - 1945-

A mist appalls the windshield.
So I still see trees as moral lessons,
as I pass under them, shadowy and astute.

The glazed aspen branches hover.
Ice heats up and cracks, road tar steams
like some animal where the blush

of cheek is chilled by annunciation.
I cannot say her face was trauma driven.
I'm still saturated with her, taking in

her etched-in countenance, otherworldly,
enveloping, frightening, the face you can't see,
pressed against it. So how can you imagine

what it feels like? Their gravity suffices,
the sealed and straining torsos
of aspens, an affront to our high-pitched moans,

feverish with disarray. Our expressions
have too much God in them, too much cloud, too much
blood on nail, too much arrow, too much quiver.

Seurat

It is a Sunday afternoon on the Grand Canal. We are watching the sailboats trying to sail along without wind. Small rowboats are making their incisions on the water, only to have the wounds seal up again soon after they pass. In the background, smoke from the factories and smoke from the steamboats merges into tiny clouds above us then disappears. Our mothers and fathers walk arm in arm along the shore clutching tightly their umbrellas and canes. We are sitting on a blanket in the foreground, but even if someone were to take a photograph, only our closest relatives would recognize us: we seem to be burying our heads between our knees.

I remember thinking you were one of the most delicate women I had ever seen. Your bones seemed small and fragile as a rabbit's. Even so, beads of perspiration begin to form on your wrist and forehead — if we were to live long enough we'd have been amazed at how many clothes we forced ourselves to wear. At this time I had never seen you without your petticoats, and if I ever gave thought to such a possibility I'd chastise myself for not offering you sufficient respect.

The sun is very hot. Why is it no one complains of the heat in France? There are women doing their needlework, men reading, a man in a bowler hat smoking a pipe. The noise of the children is absorbed by the trees. The air is full of idleness, there is the faint aroma of lilies coming from somewhere. We discuss what we want for ourselves, abstractly, it seems only right on a day like this. I have ambitions to be a painter, and you want a small family and a cottage in the country. We make everything sound so simple because we believe everything is still possible. The small tragedies of our parents have not yet made an impression on us. We should be grateful, but we're too awkward to think hard about very much.

I throw a scaling rock into the water; I have strong arms and before the rock sinks it seems to have nearly reached the other side. When we get up we have a sense of our own importance. We could not know, taking a step back, looking at the total picture, that we would occupy such a small corner of the canvas, and that even then we are no more than tiny clusters of dots, carefully placed together without touching.

Ira Sadoff

1975

The rabbi doesn't say she was sly and peevish, fragile and voracious, disheveled, voiceless and useless, at the end of her very long rope. He never sat beside her like a statue while radio voices called to her from God. He doesn't say how she mamboed with her broom, staggered, swayed, and sighed afternoons, till we came from school to feed her. She never frightened him, or bent to kiss him, sponged him with a fever, never held his hand, bone-white, bolted doors and shut the blinds. She never sent roaches in a letter, he never saw her fall down stairs, dead sober. He never watched her sweep and murmur, he never saw spider webs she read as signs her life was over, long before her frightened husband left, long before they dropped her in a box, before her children turned shyly from each other, since they never learned to pray. If I must think of her, if I can spare her moment on the earth, I'll say she was one of God's small sculptures, polished to a glaze, one the wind blew off a shelf.

It's time to put the aside the old resentments; lies, machinations, the paranoia, bugs in telephones, the body bags, secret bombings, his sweaty upper lip, my cousin Arnie, too dumb to go to school, too virtuous to confess he'd give blow jobs for nothing at the Paramount, so he lost a leg in Da Nang. Now it's time for amnesiacs to play Beethoven's Eroica by Nixon's casket. To applaud his loyalty, to grant a few mistakes, to honor his diplomacy, him and his pal Kissinger who bombed the lush green paddies of Cambodia. And now for a few lyric moments as I wait patiently for my fiftieth birthday. Wood ducks decorate the pond near this farmhouse, and in the marsh I've spied a meadow lark, a fox, a white-tailed hawk who soars above the Western Mountain peaks. Oh, I'm in love with the country all right. So I can forget my friend Sweeney, who shot Congressman Lowenstein because the radio in his tooth insisted on it. I remember the march on the Pentagon in purple, a proud member of the Vegetarian Brigade. I was drugged, as many of us were drugged, as my parents were drugged by a few major networks, by a ranch house and an Oldsmobile. I once spit on Hubert Humphrey, threw a brick through Dow Chemical's plate-glass door. I wrote insane letters to Senators, burying them in moral rectitude: I got a response from one: Senator Kennedy — the dead one — whose office wrongly argued for slow withdrawal instead of Instant Victory. I remember Tricky Dick in Nineteen Fifty-three: I'm eight years-old, frightened and ignorant, lying down before my parents' first TV: my aunts and uncles sitting in a circle, biting their nails, whispering names of relatives awaiting trial, who, thanks to Nixon, lost their sorry jobs. You can see why I'd want to bury this man whose blood would not circulate, whose face was paralyzed, who should have died in shame and solitude, without benefit of eulogy or twenty-one gun salutes. I want to bury him in Southern California with the Birchers and the Libertarians. I want to look out my window and cheer the remaining cedars that require swampy habitats to survive. To be done with shame and rage this April afternoon, where embryonic fiddleheads, fuzzy and curled and pale as wings, have risen to meet me. After all, they say he was a scrappy man, wily and sage, who served as Lucifer, scapegoat, scoundrel, a receptacle for acrimony and rage — one human being whose life I have no reverence for, which is why I'm singing now.

Poems

February

More by Ira Sadoff

Seurat

My Mother's Funeral

On the Day of Nixon's Funeral

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Poems

February

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