My friends were making fun of me. They told
me that my sense of humor really sucked,
that my wardrobe was a sight to behold.
I ran away across a field and ducked
through my grandmother’s broken garden gate
and into her living room, where she’d left
a stack of cookies on a marble plate.
From another room, she spoke about theft
of self-respect. “It gets taken away,
always by the people you trust the most.”
“I don’t believe you,” I wanted to say,
but she had already become a ghost.
The cookies in my mouth were warm and sweet—
the plate broke into pieces at my feet.
“We’re not hearing the entire story,”
my brother declares, “She has full blown cancer,
not just some minor inflammatory
congestion.” He waited for me to answer,
but I was thinking of the space under
the pine trees on her lawn in Delray Beach
where I heard the breeze turn to thunder
when I was nine, the quiet crash of each
green needle slicing through the atmosphere.
“What are you doing under there?” she cried
from the house, “You’ll track all that dirt in here.
Brush off your clothes before you come inside!”
Her voice had just outmatched the rising gale.
Now it takes all day for her to exhale.
Lately I’ve been talking in my sleep
about assisted suicide; morphine
overdoses, sterile syringes, cheap
amphetamines. Where is the line between
the Hippocratic Oath and just twisting
someone’s tired mortal coil into a cage?
There’s a bracelet on her wrist insisting
that all nurses and doctors disengage
the moment she stops breathing, but her hand
keeps rising from the sheets like pistol
which my father takes as a reprimand
for some shortcoming—not the epistle
delivered by a body with no voice
to say she wants to make her final choice.
Does it sound as though she didn’t love me?
Then I should write about the way she stood
at the table, hovering above me,
so resplendent in her grandmotherhood,
as I slowly devoured the French toast
she made from day-old challah. I could smell
the cigarette in her right hand, almost
redolent—as if it didn’t foretell
the end of all breakfasts, the last pancake,
the day I’d finally make her matzo brei
perfectly—no, now I feel like a fake;
imitate her cooking, identify
it as her love. Once again, I’ve blown it.
From my cooking, you’d never have known it.
They had to cut me in half at the waist
to get me out of the inverted car.
At least, that’s what they said as they replaced
the IV in my arm. I went too far
past my grandmother’s house on a curving
dirt road through the woods at an ill-advised
speed of sixty-eight, taking unnerving
turns on only two wheels. They said they fused
my two halves together—when it’s done fast
there shouldn’t be any problems; I’d walk
right out the door without even a cast.
We mark out a corpse with a line of chalk
on pavement—I am still walking around,
but her outline lies somewhere on the ground.
So here’s what I don’t want to write about:
the way I had to lift up her night gown
to help take off the diaper, all without
touching her skin. I knew she’d rather drown,
but my bare palms grazed her angular hip—
her flesh moved with my hand, sliding along
the bones, unresisting—I want to skip
this part. It wasn’t really all that long
ago that her sense of decency ran
the house, and now I’ve seen her pubic hair,
the lines of varicose veins that began
at her waistline and ended everywhere.
And now, the most criminal thing of all:
that’s the final image that I recall.
I heard they scattered her ashes in France
where my uncle lives in the summertime.
Her remains will fertilize the plants
and flowers of Alsace-Lorraine. No crime,
I guess. She didn’t say what she wanted,
but no funeral, no long, schmaltzy toast,
and please make sure the house goes unhaunted
by anything resembling her ghost.
Someone at work told me they’d heard the Jews
bury vertically. I said we take
less space that way—in fact, we use
the bones for making flour, and bake
delicious cakes, and sometimes even bread!
What use could my family have for the dead?
The vultures circle the kitchen table
for bagels, onions, and cream cheese. They’ve spent
the morning in her closets, unable
to sort through her things without argument—
This watch can’t be worth what she said it was.
The realtor will have a fit when she finds
that you took that painting. And just who does
he think he is, taking down all the blinds?
They flutter their wings, they bob their bald heads,
they wrap the carpet in plastic and haul
it out the sliding door—but I’ve misled
you. I’ve used they when I, too, had the gall
to claim a few of her things for my own,
like her desire to be left alone.
Only marry a Jewish girl, she said.
It will save you certains kinds of trouble.
I got engaged to a gentile instead;
a girl who was Uma Thurman’s double.
Chain smoker. Catholic. Angry. Who cares?
I couldn’t really call myself a Jew—
no bar mitzvah, no Friday evening prayers.
You’d only find the barest residue
of Yiddish in Granny’s vernacular,
but she wanted this Jewish thing preserved.
Her objections were quite spectacular,
hollering that I’d get what I deserved—
My fiancée called me a Christ killer
the night that I finally broke up with her.
So now I’ve become obsessed with her hands.
I took all her knitting needles, and then
I hid them like some kind of contraband.
I can’t use them until the moment when
I can touch them without feeling her grip
around my wrist, her fingers on my arm,
the caustic slap of her palm like a whip
on the back of my hand. You can’t disarm
a ghost whose method of haunting is guilt,
and exorcism doesn’t work for Jews,
especially not for the ones who’ve built
an existence based on avoiding pews.
So this is her last will and testament:
enough guilt to become a sacrament.
Her living room has turned into the gate
between here and the place that no one can
talk about. Her short breaths evaporate
en route from mouth to ceiling fan,
and in between I see something unlock,
a window that opens while staying shut.
My brother says that this is all a crock
of shit, and would I hurry up and cut
out the new-age harmonic convergence trash,
but he’s not here right now, and I swear
that when I came in here I tore a gash
in the fabric of things—there is my chair,
the bed, the room, my grandmother, and me.
Everything else is an anomaly.
