I must confess, I changed one of the lines in the poem--
the third line.
It really is supposed to read, "in January, we missed July."
But I'm in Tucson, so I switch it up for you guys.
[LAUGHTER]
Please, don't tell the poetry gods what I've done.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm a the poetry chameleon.
This next poem is titled "History."
"It is Budapest, and the December light
is lost in the dark of the morning fog.
And memory is trying to lift its weight from the River Danube.
To that basin, history has watered down.
It is the fog, tired of being above it all.
Follow me, it says.
We don't have to commit to the land or its people.
We can make love to the Earth and leave its bed alone.
We can roll over headstones, and no one
will know the names of the dead.
We can slow the movement of horses
and pass their fear back to time.
We are all in exile, the fox says.
When he was a young man at Auschwitz,
my father leapt out of line for a potato,
and was saved by a bell that never rang.
60 years later, he stands in his place by his mother's tomb.
The only tomb containing his hunger for memory.
Feed me, feed me.
He does not cry, like the ground does not cry.
1944 from its spring.
And the horses clucking the cemetery walls
do not cry for the fog to deepen.
Only a congregation of birds hovering and Talmudic chatter
tolls the silence as a distant river's passage
rolls over the frozen limbs of winter.
What they learned before they fluttered out of formation
and what they look like in full flight,
and whether the birds ever return to pay homage
are simply questions that remain never far from home.