for amber, powdered sugar, and bronze
punished
for nostalgic despair
sent into exile
for bouts of melancholia—-
trumped up charges
under stalin
what could zygmunt do
but avoid controversy
sublimation became the name of the game——
——-
up grovesner’s peak yesterday
in the high terrain
i noticed stripes painted across the blacktop
instead of those horizontal steel bars
the cattle won’t cross either
classical conditioning
——
this is how i celebrate solstice
with kleyzmer and yiddish
”fly my little bird, fly…
o! master of the universe, why
do you make a fool of out of me…
when the pear trees blossomed in spring time,
and the children played noisily….
once, once, once i had a home, ….”
on the mountain in cleveland
i found you in heaven
when the sky turned red—
an ocean of sunflowers
planted against bugs
,
goldstein wrote a song
describing his loss,
“one hundred one hundred oy, oy,
ninety nine, ninety eight, oy oy….”
he turns the secret dial
from a radio once abandoned,
in a sky that’s fully reddened,
a house with soft words and a nice good smoke,
“nokh a glezl vayn…”
“zol zayn
gelebt”
two or three children
fell through the
cracked ice,
and grandma visited the nobleman’s house with tomas and christina
for milk sweets and fruit sours,
through the larch wood i saw them
they come to her house
for fried dough on porcelain,
for amber, powdered sugar, and bronze.
