Jerusalem
In the Old City, a guide tell his group
it's safe to walk around, all the quarters
monitored by surveillance cameras.
I look up and see a steel gray lens
lilting back and forth,
an eye trying to anchor in time:
A man in a black hat and coat
crosses the road in front of a car
reading from his prayer book.
He mumbles in Hebrew
and then his voice begins to tremble--
a yud shimmers
like a butterfly stopped in mid-air.
Alongside him a man in a djellaba
hears the muezzin's cries
and breaks into a run,
his urgent Allah ak-bar, Allah ak-bar
parting the crowd.
We go back to our apartment,
walls made of Jerusalem stone.
I stare at one piece until I see a face emerge--
a lion resting, merely resting.
Summer Camp
We line up to play bombardment
and everyone wants to be on
Bobby Thewman's team.
We know the rage in his eyes
as he pulls back his right arm,
the white ball suddenly not a white ball.
We've all had it hurled into our stomachs,
the greasy breakfast eggs an unwanted return.
We go back to the same camp in the Catskills
every year, children of survivors
from the same German-Jewish 'hood--
so we can name the perpetrators,
hear them screaming in a language
we speak to our families, identify
our grandparents in photos and letters.
We're stunned when Bobby Thewman
doesn't return one June.
He moved in with relatives across the country,
his parents having made a pact:
his father firing the first of two shots.
The plane is dark except for one light in the galley where a stewardess chips away at a block of ice. She would be embarrassed if she knew I notice how intent she is, that I might go so far as imagining what’s on her mind—the ice giving way to a face, a hand, a man’s torso. Or perhaps she’s thinking of a phone call unanswered on the other side of the world. Today I’ll be alone in a city where no one knows me. It’s my weakness, to enjoy being invisible on a crowded street where I can’t understand the words. When I can take a walk on the Ile St. Louis, look into a window and join the family for a lunch of rabbit or fish, a glass of grandfather rambling on about life under de Gaulle— until someone knocks into me, and I vanish.