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On A Crowded Bus
after Ryzard Krynicki
A bus from El Paso
is nothing like a train
from Friedrichstraße station
with its memorial to the children
going east going west
A bus from El Paso
to Los Angeles to Sacramento
is nothing like a trip
through the desert
without water, without food
Listen
this is where the color goes
the landscape greening with spring rains
yellow mustard blooming
in the fields
On the oneway sign by the freeway
someone wrote One Tree
At the border the sign reads
There are good people here
To take, to carry, not to tarry
on the long bus ride
away from the border
the children don’t cry don’t wave
Before the Clean Up
Syzmborska wrote about the street cleaner and the glazier
but not the child whirling through the playground scattering
the carefully assembled block town another had created
leaving behind the sound of a shout and dust.
This was before the battle or was it after – was Bettelheim
the one who claimed children played out their witness?
A massacre, a war, is a creature of scale exploding
into its monstrous character with each shot, each bomb,
each break in a water line. Yet the flowing water
can’t wash away all the blood all the dust. A woman
is sitting in a safe room too furious and afraid to say
a word. She recognizes each variety of missile by sound.
Once she sang about birds, the way some women do,
when their children have walked out into this broken world.
The Lost Voice
In merging galaxies the light of one
blocks another
in so many love stories
someone plays the role of trailing spouse
which doesn’t mean hiking the Appalachian trail
or across the great divide
instead it means Gretel making the wrong decision
when asked to choose between bread crumbs and stones
Already the galactic halo of Andromeda
is touching that of the Milky Way
in the hesitant coming together
that belongs to most beginnings
before salt fat acid heat merge
into an ineffable flavor
or the people in become a group reimagining books
or children or parents too fond of the liquor cabinet
Once when I mentioned Galaxiessomeone asked did you mean millions or billions?
On the Porch With Five Aunts Who Claim History
after Philip Ordang, 99 Proofs
1) They lived through it, so they know more than you do.
2) History insists on her own narrative, so aunts are useful here. Uncles less so, because they seldom admit to roles on the sidelines.
3) Really, a graphic novel is the way to go when describing past times. Think Persepolis. Or Maus, or half a dozen other banned books. They provide feeling as well as the texture of a time.
4) Explaining history to children is a tricky proposition. At the Purim play when the puppet king sent soldiers after the Jews, my daughter screamed. There was no comforting her.
5) At the training, we were told History is a Jigsaw, therefore students are less bored when provided with literal jigsaw pieces to match up as they travel through the confines of the classroom.
6) Every axiom comes from a proposition, however rearranged the stories.
7) In the box of old pictures, we see this street from a perspective of 75 years ago. On my side of the block it doesn’t look that different but across the way there was no train station, no enormous parking lot.
8) Before attempting to discuss history, try not to get too nervous.
9) Not me, not my time.
10) In adolescence, silence used to sneak up on me. I’d sit in the room across the desk from the counselor unable to think of a thing to say.
11) There was one session with a long list of questions. After that a blank blue book.
12) Long ago I taught children to use a ruler and compass to draw daisies around their stories. The boy who had spent six months in jail, sitting beside the one who had spent nine years in private school. One showed me the compass and told me This is a weapon.
13) Masha proved 1 = 2 which at the time seemed amazing to me; now I know that is typical.
14) If they are wrong it is genocide
But it is not the case they are wrong
Therefore it is not genocide
15) That is the reasoning of the book banners.
16) The further back you go, the more you are talking archeology, the less history. Recently the land bridge idea was disproven by dating footprints in sandstone that aligned with stories the first nations told.
17) My aunts told one version, my uncles another.
16) In those days love came after the arranged marriage, or so I’ve been told
17) For the interpreters of history, love is a side note; or somewhat further away than a footnote, though who wouldn’t buy a book titled The History of Love.
18) Give me space they say, after the start of an affair, or when the infant transforms into a schoolchild.
19) Those kind of people bend night to their desires.
20) When you define love, do you include the scent between baths, or the tang of salt?
21) Bob used to diagram love and everything else. I thought it was a bit shoddy the way he used a division sign that didn’t actually quotient up as they say. So I didn’t quote him.
22) You really can’t substitute one for the other, despite the fact I come from a family where, It is as easy to love a rich man as a poor man. My grandmother never did take her own advice, and spent her life working behind the counter, which was not all bad, given her affinity for the notions she sold..
23) Symmetry is one of the main things we go for in assigning beauty. And no one is terribly friendly to the man with one blue eye, and one brown eye. My love’s eyes are green, which I noticed when young, but it is hard to see now.
24) Groups are the starting point of symmetry. I had the aunts, and the uncles.
25) They had the history and the interruptions.
_________Carol Dorf is a Zoeglossia fellow, and a Jewish Studio Project fellow whose books include “Theory-Headed Dragon.” Their writing appears on the Poetry Foundation website, and in the journals that include “Pleiades,” ”About Place,” “Cutthroat,” “The Reform Jewish Quarterly,” “Shofar,” “The Museum of Americana,” “Exposition Review,” “Unlikely Stories,” “The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics,” ”Scientific American,” and “Maintenant.” They are founding poetry editor of Talking Writing, and taught math in Berkeley USD.