Shepherd
Jesus was one
but I am not thinking about sheep
rather German ones
because a woman from the synagogue
has two beloved pets
of her eleven-year-old twin sons
and she has cancer and is in hospice
and the women from the sisterhood
are organizing meals for the family
I bring coconut lentils and challah
and meet these gorgeous dogs
living outside
matted underweight
with dirty ears and fleas
and learn there are not two but three
and all they want is love and attention
and more food as they add
to the chaos of the house
two nearly teenage boys
a sick mom with bumps on her forehead
where cancer protrudes
a hospital bed in the living room
laundry piled by the washer
and one woman
lying in the bed where she will die
she examines her flock
making the sheep pass under her staff
and knows the shepherds must go to another home
where they shall not want
where they might lie down in green pastures
frolic beside still waters
so I organize to bring them to a breed rescue
two hours south
I think it will restore my soul
I believe it is the path of righteousness
one by one I carry them as though
in the valley of the shadow of death
I bring these gorgeous scared dirty animals
to new homes hoping they will know no evil
hoping they will find comfort know love
I return home to my own pack
and hold them tightly
anointing their heads with oil
my cup overflows
this action this rescue
it was right
it was just
but still six months later
I am filled with regret and sadness and grief
I took those dogs away
from their mother from her beautiful twin boys
I am no shepherd
I am no savior
even imagining those dogs
large and fluffy
now healthy
free from fleas and heartworm
in wonderful homes
I feel pain and sadness
I want only goodness and kindness
to pursue me all the days of my life
I want to dwell in the house
of the L!rd for the length of my days
but I am marked
How could I do that to a dying woman?
What will restore my soul?
Not Enough
for Stanley Plumly
Can there be too many days of sunshine?
Too many blue skies with fluffy white clouds?
My mother insisted there were never
enough days of vacation in Florida.
My teacher dies a few months after the beloved
poet of my youth There is all around us
I have never regretted staying at home
on a hot sunny day or when overcast and cloudy.
Two dear friends have cancer
I can smell the petrichor
A friend mourns death of one in her generation
she cries, no longer my grandparents,
no longer my parents’ generation, now mine!
At every age my people have died
we lived and died in the plague
age did not matter the grim one reaped
My mother never moved to Florida
in retirement as she always dreamed.
I have never regretted staying home
to read, rain or shine. Words divine.
No, no there are not too many sunny days.
Less than a week from your death,
I can still hear you sigh about my poem
as I sit on a chair during office hours
you sigh, scratch your head
pick up a pencil to fix my poem.
There are too few days of sunshine.
Too few.
Drop Cloth
My best friend in college
(she was never my lover)
had a gorgeous jade plant.
In spite of paltry sun during Michigan
winters, that jade grew large
with tall limbs and thick, waxy leaves.
My friend moved it with care,
from apartment to apartment
from Ann Arbor to Iowa then back
to Michigan. When I land in Florida,
twenty-five years later, I have no
houseplants and the projects of my youth—
broken chairs, a large round mirror
that needed to be remounted, a table
waiting for new tiles—all have been
shed as trash. My life feels as barren
as my body. When I discover for free
a wrought iron loveseat and chair,
I am delighted. Classic, old Florida.
They just need a fresh coat of paint.
While heat and humidity hang
like Spanish moss, I pull from the storage
shed old sheets left behind by the previous
owner. One has blue and black speckles.
I pause. Twenty-five years ago,
while my best friend was tending the jade,
I had a lover who bought these sheets
from QVC. I remember them freshly-
laundered, warm from the dryer.
With a matching comforter, I slept
on them many nights before we parted.
This lover then was my age now when we
were together and I was twenty-three.
These sheets seem a message from my past
that I do not know how to decipher.
I pull them, spread them on the Saint Augustine
grass to spray paint the new metal chair
and love seat for the side patio.
It takes days to finish; rain and humidity
hamper progress. Middle-aged,
I thought I would be nostalgic
but what I want is not sex
on these sheets with the lesbian
folk-singer audiences adored.
What I want is not a return
to lovers from the past,
to unbridled, voracious sex
those memories are today a drop cloth
for larger projects. What I want
is the tenderness of my college friend
for that jade. How she watered it.
How she tended it. How it grew
always reaching for the sun.
Mangoes or Maybe Pomegranates
When I was nineteen a friend
recounted her dream to me—
I admired this woman desperately—
her brown Italian leather boots
her glamorous studio apartment
silver bracelets rattling on her wrists
like Wonder Woman’s amulets—
she was a graduate student
worldly at twenty-five
I wanted to grow up and be her
In the dream all of her ex-lovers
handed her a mango
or maybe a pomegranate
She was an archeologist
fluent in Akkadian
pomegranate seems
more fitting for one devoted
to ancient Sumerians
Today I tell this story
to a young friend—she is twenty—
and she like me at nineteen
loves this dream of mangoes
or pomegranate of sweet drippy fruits
handed gingerly by the people
you have loved and left
but at fifty I no longer want this dream
today I am friends with
too many exes on Facebook
where casual scrolls reveal
their perfect lives as I recollect
our imperfect time together
No I do not want dreams of mangoes
I do not want dreams of former lovers
I do not want to be nineteen or twenty-five again
I have my own leather boots
my own silver bracelets
my own PhD
I do not read Akkadian
and I do not want to
Some days alone in my kitchen
I eat pomegranates
some days mangoes
Passover
Dodged a bullet is one way
you described not getting AIDS
though we know the metaphor
inadequate. AIDS not shot
like a gun, not even buckshot
with people in a small room.
A nuclear bomb? Perhaps
for the many who died and those
who survived sick and damaged
but even that is inapt
as nuclear detonation
would have been visible to all
and we lived and died and suffered
in too much silence as I am
reminded again in this new epidemic
as progressives in their
fifties and sixties say
we’ve never seen anything
like this before and I always a pedant say
you have never seen it
but many of us have lived it
and I am reminded of all of this
pain and grief and loss
when your partner of many years
calls because you
are in the hospital
cancer floating in your body
tumors two large and fifty small
nestled in your brain
No matter what metaphor we
invoked for AIDS
your body remained free
free of the virus and now
gorgeous at seventy-eight
I want you to have a pass
from death forever
I imagine a lamb I might slaughter
to mark your door
prevent you from being marked for death
Yes, Michael, now we are citizens
but my wish for you:
never be an angel.1
_____
1. The final three lines riff on Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.
Monumental
for Mike Smith
First everyone died
of a million different things
rotting skin
wasting
something eating their insides
it was ghoulish
and for a long time
no one knew why
just living soon to be corpses
wandering the streets
while doctors and nurses recoiled
and puzzled
Then there was a quilt
for memory
for warmth
for tenderness
when the world could not give it
burly men reduced to skeletons
and stitchery
and there you were
never a firebrand
the operations man
warehousing
transportation
exhibition
a fabric document
of our lives
a living memorial that became
national monument
and still everyone
was dying
until it waned
and you still living
working
making
stitching a life
Then yesterday
you married
a beloved
and your eighty-something parents
danced at your wedding
and were I a believer
which I am not
I might name this
not monument
but miracle
