Maxim D. Shrayer – Three Poems

Thomas Mann has returned to the city of Lübeck. 

The municipal elders have gathered to welcome him home.

He‘s old. He blushes. He feels like a young German lover.

And he doesn’t know how to abolish his shame.

Katia Mann tells her husband: “We don’t belong in this country.

How eerie this place, how sated with murderous joy.

All is lost. At the kirche the bride has been wailing since sunrise.

Buxtehude’s great organ has been vandalized and destroyed.”

“Darling,” says Thomas Mann. “On the strand of my youth, Travemünde,

sand is weightless like ashes and cold like unearthly embrace.

All my life I’ve been faithful to Germany. Now what an ending 

to discover that nothing of mine remains.”

At a wine tasting outside San Gimignano I met

a Saudi aristocrat with perfectly chiseled fingers.

His noble face was stuck half the distance 

between Rabbi Marx’s and Rabbi Freud’s,

but swarthier. Together we stood on a grassy 

terrace overlooking fourteen terracotta towers, 

a sloping vineyard, and a mound of silver olive trees. 

I said the world had gone mad, and he understood 

I didn’t mean it to be about the war but only about 

the summer sun of Tuscany on that February afternoon.

He was sipping Chianti with a faint peppery nose;

I was wearing a dark blue kipa with a white trim.

The Saudi said he and his friend were driving to Milan 

for a soccer game, and I said they were so lucky.

Come with us, he offered, we have two extra tickets.

I was tempted to say thank you, akhi, but I held back.

He looked away and tugged at his smoldering beard 

as I retreated and returned to my table, my wife 

and younger daughter, and my unfinished crostata 

made of flour, sugar, butter, and blood orange.

The year we married

my late father-in-law,

who as a child

had survived Transnistria,

told my wife that

I would be a noose

around her neck and

all I would want to do

is stay at home 

and write poems.

He was wrong 

about poverty

and the noose,

but he was right

on the nose

about poetry.