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.


Crossing

When we see them from the road to Essouria we're stunned
even though we were told to expect them: the goats

grazing the branches of the Argan trees.
It seems like a dream and minutes later we laugh
and talk about it that way--the black shapes
symbols of a darker side gone wild. And then
what it would be like to live in Morocco together--
the unfamiliar freeing us, the border
between what we do and don't know thinning.

Mornings we walk through the medina, arms locked
then return to our tiny room with a bed and sink,
where the rushing sounds of the hall toilet
drown our the muezzin, the net
over our bed becoming second skin.
In the desert the dunes appear like waves
and you say you'll sculpt them that way--
the white marble undulating in the light.


The Turning

A day before mother dies

she calls out father’s name—

the long version, Maximilian.

It comes out like a question as if

she is asking whether or not

he will embrace her after the years

she has been alone trying

to come into her own name, Flora—

a calla lily, gracious but still mournful.

Or after all the times she screamed at him

and called him Idiot,

even in front of the neighbors,

the three syllables that would ring

through our tiny apartment,

putting us on alert: mother is depressed.

Towards the end when she watched TV

she wanted me to fix the characters’

marital problems, her way perhaps

of asking forgiveness. She would turn to me

especially during the screaming and beg:

Please, please, you have to help them.