AGAIN, I SEE THE DAWN
of my childhood when women stood
lonely in Edward Hopper windows,
still in their full slips, or already
in flowered housecoats.
They took in these moments
after their husbands left for work
and before their children woke up
clamoring for those tiny boxes of cereal,
perforated for easy opening,
the milk poured
right into the boxes’ wax paper lining,
a miracle—
only a spoon to wash.
Soon the laundryman would deliver
the wet wash and each side window
opened, rusted pullies creaking
as clothes were clothespinned
to ropes that spanned alleyways in arcs.
The women shopped wearing one
of their three weekday dresses,
stockings rolled over rubber bands
just below the knees.
Tasks, tasks, tasks, then dusk
when front windows opened
again and women leaned out,
shouting down to their children
Get upstairs
in Italian, in Greek, in Yiddish,
in German, in brogues, in dialects.
But at dawn, all spoke silence.
VICTORIANA
How imprisoned she is by the high neck
of her Gibson Girl blouse,
the edge of lace beneath the chin,
the yoke, the puffed sleeves that taper
to wrist flounces. She can’t wait
to take off the swan-bill corset
that forces her torso into an S-shape.
She hasn’t patience to put her dark hair
up in a perfect pompadour
nor does she sport even one strategic waterfall curl.
I wish you could hear her belt out in her thick Cockney,
Lottie Collins, she ’ad no sense.
She bought a fiddle for eighteen pence.
She was no suffragette, but she bought
and ran a millinery shop, a candy store,
owned four large rental houses and birthed three kids.
My daughter, before you empty my house
someday and decide you don’t want a sepia
framed photo of a woman you never met,
before this photo lands in an antique shop
and a customer tries to get a few bucks knocked off
because the white nicks in the frame
reveal that it’s a faux mahogany finish
painted over plaster, I want to introduce you
to your great-grandmother.
Meet Ada Bloom.
WAYS OF ENTERING A DREAM
You can waltz into a wobbling raindrop,
become its iridescence, its sheen.
You can be a figurine
in a Fabergé egg
spirited out of a tsar’s palace
and into a glass case at the Met,
yet you’re free to gallop into the ocean,
that cradle of all raindrops.
You can bumble into the basement
of bugaboos, a spider you only know
is there by the web that breaks on your face
and you don’t know if the spider is still in it
or dangling somewhere.
It’s so Miss Muffet to be scared of spiders.
You can fly into a dream, feel your spread-eagled self
lift off your mattress, the whoosh of wind,
the squeeze in your stomach and your limbs
as you fly over the roofs of your childhood.
Last night I entered my grandfather’s parlor
in his torn-down house on East Raynor Avenue.
There he sat, plump and pale, his hair dandelion fluff.
He told me his mixed-up story of the Gardener
and the Three Bears, and laughed
his rumbling unfiltered Camels laugh.
His cheeks bloomed with a shot of schnapps.
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