So this one's in seven parts, and it's called Snow.
And it's from my mother-in-law Margaret Falk,
who was an immigrant born in Vienna, Austria, Austrian Jew,
whose family died in the Holocaust,
but who gathered up enough money to send her to, what was then,
the Dutch Indies Indonesia.
And she was sent to Java because she
had Dutch relatives in Java, who the Nazis,
said, well, if you have someone to, you can work
and you can get papers.
Then we'll let you leave and you can go to Java, which she did.
And she was there three years, I think,
before the Japanese occupied those islands.
And then she was put in a prisoner of war camp for almost
four years, 3 and 1/2 years.
So she lived through hell several times over.
So this is a poem for her.
Snow.
Oh, and one note.
So I use a German phrase--
so she spoke German, of course, growing up in Austria.
And she says at one point or in the poem, du bist verrückt,
which means you're crazy.
Snow.
Czechoslovakia.
Blooming in your childhood in the 30s,
there was a field so white in early June.
Your grandmother said a frantic snow must have fallen
while you and Walter slept.
A miracle, she said.
A celestial tablecloth set with careful lace
by Queen Anne herself.
Did you talk of Vienna with your blonde playmates,
the local villagers as you, your older sister,
and younger brother gathered jars
of gooseberries for late tea?
Do you remember which children turned away
when the Nazis came.
when the white field hardened its mantle,
and your farmhouse went up in flames
Two.
Vienna.
The snow falls inside a glass dome.
It looks like dandruff, your brother's jokes.
You have no mother to scold him.
So you cut his shoulder saying, Walter, or Walter,
du bist verrückt.
The snow falls like logic from--
no.
The snow swirls like memory.
The boy, the chimney sweep inside the dome
will lose his head.
Three.
Java.
Three years, almost four, in the prison camp.
The jungle closing in the Japanese guards
swollen with hate with the yeast of fear
with the humid swelter of the spiraling war.
In green canopies overhead, monkeys howling,
army ants on the march, maggots in the bread.
Live snow, you think.
Then you abandon religion for a while.
Then you pray.
Four.
New York.
The Bronx delivers itself over to winter like a novice
taking the veil.
But the weather is blasphemous, wicked in its relentless futile
devotions.
Why are you still alive?
Your mother, father, brother, sister, brother-in-law,
and nephew, all dead.
Bracing yourself against the sleet,
your belly grown round is a balloon,
you push on to the subway.
Your eyelashes lattice with snowflakes.
Your footsteps effaced.
Your breath exhaling ghosts.
Five.
Laguna Hills.
Seizure World, your son calls it.
It's called Leisure World.
Seizure World, your son calls it.
This place of palm tree gentility,
Southern California's oasis for gray haired denizens
for the living.
From here, you can see our Alps 50 miles north
where Mount Baldy points towards a vacant heaven.
Some of your friends, survivors too, have moved out.
The locked gates, you say, disturb them, reminding them
of the German camps.
But you like it here.
The group bus tours of Laughlin and Las Vegas
where you clutch your purse in the great gambling
halls suspicious of luck.
Six.
Mount Baldy.
Your eldest granddaughter bears your likeness,
most the green eyes, aquiline nose, sensual lips.
In college now, with the world history paper due,
she asks you about the war and you weep.
A heavy silence darkens our Thanksgiving table.
Outside, snow laden winds lash themselves against the windows.
The room stands still as if cupped in the eye of a tornado.
Then hailstone's tiny fists awaken us.
Seven.
Hear.
Some sorrows in life bloom slowly
into the six pointed stars of wisdom.
Others slow the blood or freeze it.
Some sorrows cannot salvage the soul from a lifelong torment
of nightmares.
Your shock of white hair is beautiful.
Beyond us, beyond the interior world,
the snow is as guileless as time or fate
as it drifts down to the frozen ground.
A light crossing your face dissolves into tears.
And those tears are mine, too.
Though I do not choose them.
Just as the beating heart, that brave and vulnerable clock,
does not choose when or where or why it must stop.
Thank you.