They turned gray
without my noticing,
faces grew lines and soft folds
of ancestral photos.
Edward turns seventy-five tomorrow.
I still see him as a boy of eight, says my mother,
the readiness for adventure,
he’ll try anything once.
Meyer is the oldest, the one who remembers
the old country,
the bandit always in trouble,
his good heart now beyond the doctors.
I did not agree to this.
I want the pull of a different gravity:
cousins all gathered lakeside,
Adirondack chairs under poplar rustle,
crunch of mandelbroit,
powdered rainbow of Turkish delight.
With them I will always be Ruthie’s child,
free to play until dinner time on the flagstone patio,
write messages on birchbark,
to stuff into a bottle, float down the lake
to the river
and away.
They turned gray
without my noticing,
faces grew lines and soft folds
of ancestral photos.
Edward turns seventy-five tomorrow.
I still see him as a boy of eight, says my mother,
the readiness for adventure,
he’ll try anything once.
Meyer is the oldest, the one who remembers
the old country,
the bandit always in trouble,
his good heart now beyond the doctors.
I did not agree to this.
I want the pull of a different gravity:
cousins all gathered lakeside,
Adirondack chairs under poplar rustle,
crunch of mandelbroit,
powdered rainbow of Turkish delight.
With them I will always be Ruthie’s child,
free to play until dinner time on the flagstone patio,
write messages on birchbark,
to stuff into a bottle, float down the lake
to the river
and away.
