A Passing
Poems
 Joan I. Siegel
deerbrook editions
R
pu bl i sh e d b y
Deerbrook Editions P.O. Box 542 Cumberland, ME 04021 www.deerbrookeditions.com issuu.com/deerbrookeditions 2 07. 829. 5038 f i r st e di t ion i sbn : 978 - 0 -9 9 0 42 87-3 -2
© 2014 by Joan I. Siegel All rights reserved
Contents A Passing 9 After the Ninth Life 10 After Thirty Years 11 Among the Married 12 And Again 13 The Diary 14 Defiant Requiem 15 Another Point of View 18 At the End 19 Beech Tree in Winter 20 Outside the Annex 21 Beethoven Sonata Op. 31 No. 2 22 Chopin Nocturne Op. 27 No. 2 23 Degas’ Dancer 24 County Road 25 Doll House 26 Dream 27 Beside the Wild Lupine 28 Each Spring the Wild Cherry 29 Early Autumn 30 Earning Her Food 31 Echo 32 Eclipse 33 Epiphany 34 Fairy Tale 35 Falling in Slow Motion Out of Love with Heathcliff 36 Old Family Photos 37 Family Stories 38 For the Sake of a Single Verse 39 Furnishings 40 Ghazal: Orpheus and Eurydice 41 Ghazal: Glass 42 Goldfinch 43 Gustave Moreau: Orpheus at the Tomb of Eurydice 44 Moses Soyer: Three Dancers (1961) 45 Some Houses 46 What the Wind Didn’t Bring 47
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Telling the Story 48 Dance 49 When My Father Walks Out of a Dream 50 Savings 51 Acknowledgments 53
To My Family
A Passing Does someone pass forever from your life the last time you hear him speaking in your sleep or remember how a certain hat slants above the eye? Or listen to that aria from Tosca and not remember the city park one April when the cherry bloomed and the grass stained your legs green? How your skin tasted of sunshine and his mouth singing was all that mattered.
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After the Ninth Life 10
Something woke me in the middle of the night. Barefoot down the long dark hallway, I saw a gray sack, empty as a shadow spilled on the cold kitchen floor. I turned back to bed. Of course I knew. He’d lived fourteen years among us. So I dreamed on through darkness letting him sleep at the foot of the bed in his accustomed place.
After Thirty Years All these years used up like pages of a book we know by heart except the ending. Although it is you who get it wrong— telling another version as if I hadn’t been there all along. You leave out words, forget the weather where I was standing the color of my dress. Sometimes you swear there is no story to tell.
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Among the Married 12
“Mating Dances Go On and On� (The New York Times)
A couple of old married grebes tap dancing on water breast to breast you & I two seahorses entwined quivering a strand of sea grass you & I peacock & peahen you & I hands and hips humming lips doing their pas de deux
And Again The ease of slipping a hand into a hand that made a good fit the first time— even the hand remembers the voice speaking in your sleep, eyes looking across a table find what they are looking for.
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The Diary 14
In the photo she looked like my sister’s best friend. I was in second grade. 1953. At recess the girls played jump rope. The boys goose-stepped to “Heil Hitler!” their fingers made a mustache above the lip. A German girl in class invited me to her house after school. When we got there, I ran all the way home. I’d heard my parents say Germans make lampshades and soap of Jewish skin. My father talked about cattle cars, concentration camps. I didn’t understand. He said the girl died. I cried all night.
Defiant Requiem Abridged version I. Requiem Oh Lord, 140,000 Jews 17,000 children passed through to Aushwitz ovens II. Kyrie Oh Lord, 15,000 children every day: hunger disease murder ovens 132 survived III. Sequence Oh Lord, food was scarce my sister stole potatoes they shot at her once when she was running with potatoes in her pants . . . We had to give lists of family names for transports to Auschwitz, neighbors from our village in Czeckoslovokia
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IV. Offertorio Music saved us…thanks be to Raphael Schachter who gave us voice to sing what we could not say to our captors. I was always sick…my mother prayed I would not die of hepatitis, pneumonia like my baby brother … she hid him in the cellar .. he cried all night… they found him and forced her to… I cannot say it!! My life was one of desperation, hard work, hunger … eaten alive by rats. Tens of thousands died mostly from disease or starvation…the Germans built a crematorium to handle 200 bodies a day. 33,000 died in the camp. 90,000 deported to extermination camps. V. Sanctus We were hungry and our stomachs were growling, and we knew nothing but the music. It is a pure piece of gold, inside and out. For the time it takes, an hour and fifteen minutes, there was no world out there… there was no war . . . there was only Verdi’s Requiem.
VI. Agnus Dei Rafael Schächter was a godsend to all the prisoners, for, after a day’s work, he engaged large numbers of prisoners in performing, and even all the prisoners, for, after a day’s larger numbers in attending [the concerts]. VII. Lux Aeterna Singing, we found, was not just taking our minds off the daily misery for the time we were singing, it gave us a lift, something we carried with us into the next day, and it helped us to overcome whatever was put upon us during the day until we again met and sang. VIII. Libera me Schächter drowned out the prison mentality that had overcome everybody there.He showed people that you can say to your oppressors in different ways what you think of them . . . there was still a way to show we can preserve human dignity.
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Another Point of View 18
In those pictures, earth rises bright as a child’s marble, lapis streaked with agate. Close up its rivers run with blood— The man carved in a thousand cuts. The girl sewn with wild thorn gang raped at the village well. The baby tossed on the bonfire. The boy with the bomb strapped to his ribs. The soldier burst like pomegranate. The moon floats up, a false sun.
At the End Not sudden as the snap of a window shade, the window’s shocking brightness. Not sharp as the knife edge of icy water. No voices beckoning at the foot of the bed. Simply, an unraveling. Quiet as the heart telling the mind to put down the book, turn off the light.
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Beech Tree in Winter 20
Wearing its coppery leaves like an old woman in her faded housedress who waits up long after the family has gone to bed. All night she keeps watch. Memory settles quiet as snow around the house.
Outside the Annex “. . . the two of us looked at the bare chestnut tree glistening with dew…”
Bent over her diary, wrestling a wayward heart turned inside out like a sweater— ragged seams showing, good side facing in…holding steady to notions of goodness. He kissed her. Their faces pressed against the sooty glass glimpsing their future through the chestnut’s bounty of flowers— blue sky, seagulls flashing like a miracle.
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Beethoven Sonata Op. 31 No.2 22
Sometimes I play the music lento instead of andante because my heart won’t walk any faster. It wants to lie down in the shade, linger a while in its sadness.
Chopin Nocturne Op. 27 No.2 à Mme. la Comtesse d’Appony To visit heaven she had only to play it as written: dolce & espressivo rising to appassionato. Then gradually dying away as the breath of his last words.
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Degas’ Dancer 24
She is the instrument for music. Music. Wake of music. She is the archer’s bow. Arrow. Flight of the arrow. She is the river. Wild crane rising. Wild crane’s shadow on water.
County Road Intent on some dark shadow in the stalks of corn, a wild hunger overruled all other wild sense. Between the cornfield and the farmer’s house it lies up turned, still warm. Halfway across the rain slick road where cars swerve past. As ordinary as a paper bag. A shirt blown off the line. Yet needs to be far more than just a thing the cold rain falls indifferently upon. It needs a quiet act of tenderness. Someone to lift it, wipe it clean. Someone to bear it up the farmhouse worn gray steps where inside someone else is pouring milk, a boy is practicing his clarinet.
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Doll House 26
On your third birthday your father builds a dollhouse smelling of sweet Canadian pine. A family moves in. You prop the boy and girl on the braided living room rug, seat mother and father on chairs, arms raised stiffly as if greeting each other for the first time. At night you speak dreams in their sleep. At thirteen you practice Latin as months of rain slide down the boarding school windows nine hundred miles from home where your mother and father don’t speak to each other and the dollhouse sits untended— the boy and girl slumped across the sofa, waiting for you to come in from the rain.
Dream Last night my dead father visited my sleep. He leaned over the bed, pulled up the blankets around my shoulders. The old comforts— rain on the roof, a train rattling through the dark. I asked, Did you sleep well? He slid downhill laughing. All day I was a child.
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Beside the Wild Lupine 28
It might have been a leaf blown from a tree the way it curled into itself beside the wild lupine. Emerald light you could touch. Aerialist fallen from the sky onto the tarmac its wings singing fiercely as the heart in its splintered cage.
Each Spring the Wild Cherry white cloud outside our bedroom window where all winter winds shagged nests unmooring birds branches tangled on a crescent moon. So many deaths that give way to this: flowers humming with the urgency of bees their honey seeping into memory lodged deep in the flesh that makes you homesick for another place that is not a place but an earlier time when it was simply enough to open your eyes in the white shade of a cherry tree in full bloom.
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