That Said Read online

  “Unforgettable.”

  Unforgettable, that’s what you are.

  Dream City

  One night, Chen Chu dreamt that he was a butterfly. In his dream, he had never been anything but a butterfly. When he woke up he didn’t know if he was Chen Chu dreaming that he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that he was Chen Chu.

  —Zen koan

  I was sleeping in a round room made of stone.

  A voice called out, “This is your room. This is your bed.”

  For months thereafter, I crossed a river

  on thoroughfares to a city that seemed familiar.

  Most nights I’d return there.

  Its turn-of-the-century architecture,

  wrought-iron and stone apartment houses,

  looked like the buildings on Park Avenue, and Fifth.

  Sometimes I dreamed hybrids of buildings

  over and over: a library–hotel, a train station–school;

  and a department store with a rickety elevator that took me

  to the fourth floor, where the dresses were.

  In one dream, I caught myself telling someone,

  “These are the clothes I wear in my dreams,”

  as I opened a closet. Inside were

  shoes, jumpers, coats, a green hat with a feather—

  my taste, my size, they even smelled like me.

  And, once, I brought someone along with me from here.

  Here, where I am when I’m wide awake.

  I said, “This is the place I always dream about.”

  As I fall asleep, my dream picks up in the place

  where it left off the night before—

  the street, the house, the room.

  The next day, I might catch a glimpse of it

  superimposed on what I’m really seeing—

  a shard of light bleeding onto a negative.

  In time, I began to see my city,

  the basso continuo playing behind the melody

  of my everyday life, as a kind of everyday life, too:

  its industry, the bustle of its people,

  its traffic, its history, its parallel ongoingness—

  But not long ago, I was traveling

  along the Jersey side of the Hudson

  where I grew up. I hadn’t been back in years:

  the woods were gone—

  the collapsing docks and broken pilings

  replaced with high-rent condos, supermarkets, malls,

  anthills in the shadow of the Palisades.

  The bridge and tunnel traffic was awful.

  Instead of taking a bus, I crossed

  to Manhattan by commuter ferry.

  In the middle of the river, I looked up

  at the skyline, the buildings

  bronzed by late-afternoon light—

  my dream city’s light—

  the city I’d dreamed since I was twelve—

  but I wasn’t dreaming.

  My husband and daughter were sitting on the bench

  on either side of me.

  Rows of strangers, too.

  Some gazed at the skyline, as I did.

  Others read their newspapers, or dozed.

  Body and Soul

  The soul remains attached to the physical body after death for the first seven days, when it flits from its home to the cemetery and back. This explains why the initial mourning period is one week. For twelve months after death the soul ascends and descends, until the body disintegrates and the soul is freed.

  —Dictionary of Jewish Lore and Legend

  Which must be the reason why,

  lying awake in my mother’s bed

  the night after her funeral, I caught her

  rummaging in the underwear drawer.

  What a relief to know

  the dead are expected to come back—

  so seeing them up and about so soon

  is no big deal.

  If you die, say, in July,

  I’d like to think that in the next few weeks,

  your soul clings like the bar code

  to the book of your body.

  Little by little, the label

  starts to peel, curling and lifting

  until the sticky underside loses its grip.

  By Labor Day, your body

  can walk your soul on a leash,

  yanking it back when it lifts a hind leg

  over the perfect green of a neighbor’s lawn.

  Around Halloween, the soul begins to rise.

  Thanksgiving,

  it’s a kind of beach ball clearing the net.

  On New Year’s Day, it flips on the trampoline

  of the body, bouncing higher and higher

  until it shoots through the roof.

  As Pesach approaches,

  the soul—tied by the ankles—

  bungee-jumps from the body,

  which, meanwhile, has been attending to

  its own messy business in the ground.

  How else to explain why

  Judah ha-Nasi would suddenly appear

  to his family on Friday nights,

  dressed in his Shabbat finery,

  recite Kiddush over the wine, and vanish.

  Or why my mother, just last week,

  stood behind me by the stove,

  telling me my kugel needs more salt.

  A retired dentist from Great Neck

  swears he’s photographed a soul leaving its body.

  And a deposed countess from Romania

  topped that,

  claiming she’s measured its weight in ounces.

  On my mother’s Yahrzeit,

  when our family gathers at the cemetery

  to unveil her headstone,

  and we’re crying, why be sad?

  Think of it as a bon voyage party—

  a soul at last at liberty

  to make its own plans.

  God’s Breath

  If God can be said to breathe the soul

  into each living thing, as he did into Adam,

  then the magician we hired

  for our daughter’s birthday party was like God.

  Before performing the rabbit-in-the-hat trick,

  before pulling shiny nickels

  from Emma’s ears,

  he got a long skinny green balloon

  and stretched it like saltwater taffy,

  then put his lips to its lip and blew.

  And it grew and grew,

  luminous and green, it grew

  in its nakedness, and when it was a yard long

  the magician knotted it,

  and with a few deft flicks twisted it

  into a dachshund—buoyant, electric, tied to a leash

  of fuchsia ribbon—that bounced

  along the floor, bumping after our daughter

  on their walks around the house.

  Weeks later, cleaning under her bed,

  I coaxed it out with a broom—

  a collapsed lung furred with dust.

  As long as it still had some life in it,

  I couldn’t throw it away.

  So I popped it with a pin.

  And God’s breath, a little puff

  from elsewhere, brushed my cheek.

  On the Way Back from Goodwill

  After Uncle Al’s final coronary,

  Aunt Flossie gave my dad

  Al’s unworn, tasseled, white

  patent-leather penny loafers,

  the Florsheim labels still stuck

  like chewing gum to the heels.

  Shoes my elegant father

  was too polite to refuse.

  So his brother-in-law’s shoes

  cured in a closet for twenty years,

  soles stiff as planks, until

  I boxed them up

  with my father’s things

  and shipped them home,

  where side by side

  in the dark crawl space

  under my roof they idled

&
nbsp; for another twenty, enduring

  long ice-hatcheting winters

  Uncle Al would have hated.

  Now the last of him

  is gone, with his temper

  tantrums, and his bad taste,

  and his black eye-patch

  that covered the empty

  socket of his right eye,

  lost in a car crash. Gone,

  the thick wad of fifties

  he carried in his pocket

  to intimidate and impress.

  No cheapskate, I slip

  a dime into the stubborn

  slot on his loafers meant

  for pennies, the way

  you’d close a dead man’s

  staring eyes with a coin

  so he won’t take you

  along with him.

  Haven’t I already

  done my time?

  Fugue

  It was not our story. It was hers.

  That’s how friends told us to think of it.

  It was not our story, it was hers.

  In what book does it say that you’re

  supposed to live until you’re eighty?

  Our house was hers for the summer.

  Our forks and spoons and knives.

  She seemed happy waving goodbye.

  We said, So long, take care, enjoy.

  It was not our problem, it was hers.

  Her clothes hung in our closets.

  Her little boy slept in our daughter’s bed

  and played with our daughter’s old toys.

  It was not our sadness. It was hers.

  Her sadness had nothing to do with us.

  She borrowed books from the library.

  Scrubbed the bathtub. Baked a pie.

  We were just going about our business.

  We were hundreds of miles away.

  It was not our madness, it was hers.

  She finished the book. Sealed

  the letter in the envelope, telling why.

  We replaced the bloody floorboards

  where their two dead bodies lay.

  We stained the new boards to match

  the old ones—a deep reddish stain

  our daughter first thought was blood

  until we told her it was not blood.

  And not our desperation, it was hers.

  It was scraped, sanded, varnished.

  No one can tell. It could have happened

  to anyone, but it happened to us.

  We barely knew her. We weren’t there.

  We didn’t want to make their tragedy

  our tragedy. It was not our story.

  They had their story. We have ours.

  Scrabble in Heaven

  They’re playing Scrabble in heaven

  to pass the time, sitting at their usual

  places around the table—

  or whatever passes for a table there—

  my father opposite my mother,

  Uncle Al across from Floss,

  husband opposite wife—all four of them

  bickering as they did in life—

  the Scrabble board laid flat

  on the wooden lazy Susan,

  as Sunday afternoons they’d play

  while dinner was cooking,

  or if my mother was too tired to cook,

  order takeout from the Hong Kong.

  After dinner, they’d resume the game,

  a conversation interrupted midsentence;

  cigarette smoke rising from ashtrays,

  dirty dishes stacked in the sink,

  chopsticks poking from the trash pail.

  They never invited me

  to join them. So I’d sprawl on the rug

  feeling sorry for myself,

  one ear tuned to Ed Sullivan on TV,

  one ear tuned to their squabbling,

  which continued even when they consulted

  the Webster’s to check a word,

  tucking its red ribbon bookmark between

  tarnished gilt-edged pages.

  Sunday after Sunday,

  the lazy Susan rotating on the table,

  the pastel squares checkering the grid,

  the light blue squares, the navy, the red,

  the black star on the pink square

  in the dead center of the empty board,

  the silky feel of the tiles brushing

  fingertips as they select the letters—

  just as I’m doing now, touching these keys—

  as their memories of the earth

  and all the words they had for them—

  daughter niece husband wife sister

  tree rock dog salt—

  diminish one by one.

  Gelato

  When Caravaggio’s Saint Thomas pokes his index finger

  past the first knuckle, into the living flesh of the conscious

  perfectly upright Jesus Christ, His bloodless wound

  like a mouth that has opened slightly to receive it, the vaginal folds

  of parting flesh close over the man’s finger as if to suck,

  that moment after Christ, flickering compassion,

  helps Thomas touch the wound, calmly guiding

  the right hand of His apostle with His own immortal left,

  into the warm cavity, body that died and returned to the world,

  bloodless and clean, inured to the operation at hand

  and not in any apparent pain—

  to accidentally brush against His arm

  would have been enough, but to enter the miraculous flesh,

  casually, as if fishing around in one’s pocket for a coin—

  because it’s in our natures to doubt,

  I’d doubt what I was seeing, too.

  Drawing closer, Thomas widens his eyes

  as if to better absorb the injury, his three companions also

  strain forward, I do, too,

  and so would you, all our gazes straining toward

  the exquisite right nipple so beautifully painted I ache to touch

  or to kiss it, press my lips to the hairless chest of a god.

  His long hippie auburn hair falls in loose