We are different from one another in the country.
Family in a trailer down the road
mother in her twenties three children
nine year old girl plays with Ahava here just a child
says what she hears knows what a child knows
We all want Ahava to play
with everyone no matter who
their mother is no matter what
they know. When Noah was a stand up
comic he had a friend named Monroe
grew up in the projects came for his
first Hanukah. We gave him latkes.
I’m never eating one of these again, he said.
Still on the porch. Ahava has a babysitter
named Blake who goes to a local
high school. She wants to be a doctor
one day because everyone in her family
is a nurse. And then there’s Chapter Seven
of my interminable book. Today is a day
for banana bread or sour cream loaf for lentil soup
a long Italian movie today is a day to finish the Lily King
novel and be grateful again and again for this porch
this rain this day.
Wish I could blame every single thing
on This President or This Pandemic
but even before This President, This Pandemic,
even before I became an official Old Jew
even before there was a Good Reason
for this to happen, most days I put my phone down
somewhere let’s say The Kitchen Table and I spend
a while trying to remember where it is and then
I use the Find My Phone device, annoyed that once again
for no good reason I can’t find my phone until
I actually do and there it is where I left it
let’s say on the Kitchen Table and for a while everything
is more or less OK.
We went to dinner
with the kids Nunzio’s Pizza
at Chalet Fondue in Windham New York.
Base of a mountain. Picnic tables facing sky.
Waiting to order pizza from Nunzio himself
Sicilian man you could tell he loved his pizza
I was wearing an African dress Chesray made
a woman waiting for pizza
asked about the dress she does
costumes for TV she said her mother
died of covid a few weeks ago memorial
last night serving Nunzio’s pizza.
Her mother liked pizza. We exchanged
numbers with her and talked about
Distance Visiting and we ate far away
from other people all eating pizza
trying not to think pandemic pandemic pandemic
even enjoying our pizza, and the large sky,
and the new woman who might come to visit.
Longtime gone my father mysterious man
my father wrote a letter
to The Evening Sentinel titled
How to Have a Good Life
Marry, he said, have two children and find a way
to earn a living
my father who sent me postcards
every week when I was in college every week when I
went to the Israeli Peace Corps my father had
a beautiful handwriting never revealed much
he had a difficult mother my father who liked puns
liked comedians liked Jack Paar
played violin and piano and said:
Think the Rain Will Harm the Rhubarb?
Not if it’s in cans.
Yesterday a reader named Jill wrote and asked
me to explain My Process. I don’t have One. Dear Reader
I Confess I don’t know what I’m going to say before I say it.
I do not have a Poetry Plan or a Fiction Plan either. Some people
know in advance where their characters will go and what will
happen when they get there. My characters wander.
They are CPAs and grocery clerks and mothers and they
are often funny and unpredictable. I don’t
know what they’ll say in advance, although I try to avoid
Many Phrases such as Lessons Learned. In my poems
and in the stories too, they are free to say things like
Stressed is Desserts backwards and God Knows What
Will Happen Next. They visit me while I am here.
Writing poems.