And I'll close with the title poems
of "Squares and Courtyards," which
also goes back and forth between Paris and New
York, the present and past.
"Across the Place du Marché-Sainte-Catherine,
the light which frames a building that I see daily
walking home from the bakery, white voile and open windows,
sudden green and scarlet window box geraniums backlit in cloud
encouraged clarity against the century-patinaed grey is such
a gift of the quotidian, of benefice of sight
and consciousness.
I sometimes stop, confused with gratitude,
not knowing what to thank or whom to bless,
break off an end of seven grain baguette
as if my orchestrated senses could confirm the day.
It's fragrant.
I eat it.
Confirm the day's fragrance: I eat, bit by bit,
the buttery pain aux raisins shell-coiled beside
my steaming afternoon tea.
It's the hour for a schoolchild's treat, munched
down, warm in waxed paper, on the street
or picked at on cheap earthenware (like mine)
beside books marked with homework to be done
while the street's sunlit, dusk-lit, lamp-lit.
She sucks her pencil, window-framed.
I sip nostalgia for a childhood not my own Bronx kitchen table,
with a fire escape in the alley shaded by sumac trees which
filtered out the other languages I heard the airshaft's
crosscurrents intone.
I heard the aircraft's crosscurrents intone
below the minyan davening morning offices.
A childish rasp that slurred and sputtered
was the Polish janitor's red-knuckled son helping
his father empty garbage cans.
His voice was why I thought him rough (as is English when
spoken by its novices) --
a voice I never heard speaking its own language.
His name was Joseph.
He was six.
Other syllables connected news from gutted Europe
to the dusty motes of Sabbath morning.
Ash settled on bricks, spun up the shaft
with voices of old Jews, was drawn down
garrulous chain-smokers' throats.
Drawn up from garrulous chainsmokers' throats
at square tin tables on wet cobblestones
just hosed down by a green-clad African street-cleaner:
strikes, prices, who still votes Left, sex, a sick child.
Hands unbutton coats halfway.
The wind's mild, but it looks like rain above the Place du
Marché-Sainte-Catherine, where charcoal-bellied clouds
converge like boats in the mutable blue harbor sky.
Another coffee, another blanc sec --
as if events were ours to rearrange with words, as
if dailiness forestalled change, as if we didn't grow old
(or not) and die as long as someone listened when we spoke.
As long as someone listened when I spoke, especially
someone walking a dog, I'd launch
into juvenile monologue: Greek myths, canine behavior,
and could I stroke the Lab or spaniel?
Speech and touch evoked my grandmother,
the bookkeeper from Prague who died as I emerged out
of the fog of infancy, while lives dispersed
in smoke above the camps (and Dresden and Japan)
and with them someone else I might have been
if memory braided with history.
I pressed my face into the dog's warm fur whose heat and smell
I learned by heart, while she receded
into words I found for her.
Receding into words I found for her delight,
someone was dispossessed of her own story (she thought)
by mine.
Receding into words, the frail and early rising neighbor who
died during my cancer treatment year is not summed up
by 'centenarian'.
Her century requires a lexicon.
I wrote a girl on paper when I bore a child, whose photocopied
life became letters tattooed across a watermark,
a woman's in the world, who shares her name.
And Gisela, who took me to the park,
for whom I pieced together sentences --
it's all the words she said to me I miss.
It's all the words she said to me I miss, down
to unechoed accents.
Did she speak Yiddish to me?
With whom did she speak Czech?
German was what my father spoke till his sixth year,
first grade.
When did he tell me this?
His parents common tongue.
And did they make love in their second language?
The air's thick with cognates, questions and parentheses
she'll scribble down once she's back in her room,
chewing her braid, tracing our labyrinthine fragments.
She zips her anorak and shifts the heavy satchel on her back,
watching low clouds gather as she walks home across the Place
du Marché-Sainte-Catherine.
Not knowing what to thank or whom to bless,
the school girl at the window, whom I'm not,
hums cadences it soothes her to repeat,
which open into other languages in which she'll piece together
sentences while I imagine her across the street
as late light shifts, sunlit dusk-lit, lamp-lit.
Is there a yellow star sewed to her dress
as she exults, confused with gratitude:
her century requires a lexicon of memory
braided with history she'll have reflective decades to write
down?
Not thinking she'll get old (or not) and die;
thinking: she can if anybody could."
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]