Barbara Lefcowitz Poetry

POCKETBOOKS

Back around 1928 when everyone wore hats

and women carried pocketbooks,

genuine alligator bags with gold clasps

big enough to hold lipsticks, powder

puffs and rouge, a stash of nickels for the subway,

perhaps even Lucky Strikes in jeweled cases,

Back around 1928 my grandma Annie

got her first silver fox shawl

with real fox-heads and paws at each end.

Rich cousin Bessie Shlansky

had a full-length sheared mink coat

and the upstairs neighbor wore beaver

with a matching hat, Rose from Albemarle Road

owned  Persian lamb plus a

leopard coat with a tam, what a zoo

when they  paraded together on Ocean Parkway

for the High Holidays.

Though hers was not a coat,

Annie  was proud at last to own fur

only a couple of decades after Ellis Island.

I don’t begrudge them their happiness

despite the flaunting of animal skins

back when Green referred to Greenhorns, the latest

immigrants, those  lucky enough to get through

before the gates of America shut

And poverty was just around the corner

the clouds in the Old Country

already tinged black.

HOLY STONE

The small white stone

I lifted from Jerusalem’s Old City

not far from the Wailing Wall

and quickly slipped into a pocket

joins upon my return

my many other free souvenirs

from the many places I’ve traveled

my Global Village of many-colored stones

tossed into a jar, not one stone

marked by place of origin

or geological tribe, nearly all

in contact but never fusing—

yet no conflicts or claims

of supremacy, so the holy stone

dominates no more than a

gray ridged stone from some place

in Asia, I guess,

or a cragged red one

I think I pilfered from Chaco Canyon.

Sometimes I shake the jar

just to make sure the nearly hidden

pebble-size green stones

rise briefly to the top.

ELVIS IN HUNGARY

Elvis lives in the heart of the Hungarian plain.

At the Nameth Laszlo high school gym

where I’ve come to help the kids speak English

Nothing but a hound dog blasts from a black box

to celebrate tomorrow’s commencement rites.

A few students hum, three boys with headbands

and hippie wigs strum chords, the shortest

thrusting his hips back and forth.

Soft laughter, light applause.

Everyone is tired.

Even the young, as if the wheels of history

made a dead stop before they were born.

With a shrug in their voices and downward lilt

they say I don’t know when I ask

their greatest wishes. Maybe a house, a job,

a motor bike. Sleep.

None dreams about black horses

galloping across the plain from distant steppes,

riders on fire, flashing swords and shouting

words no one else can speak

to keep out the Ottomans, Austrians,

Nazis, Russians, hip-hop, Burger King,

porno flicks. Nobody weeps to gypsy violins,

dances the czardas, wears brightly embroidered

blouses and skirts, wonders about life

before microwaves and computers.

Suddenly I feel at home.

THOSE WHITE THINGS

They could be moths, feathers

shed by faraway swans, sheaves

of wheat from the heavens

as if the old gods still rule,

a tour group with torn wings

that must flock together

for a few days lest they miss the ride home—

Damn! Some well-meaning fool ruins my fun

by telling me they’re ordinary seed pods

from sycamore trees that return every spring.

And they become just another irritant

that reddens my eyes.

SUNSET BOULEVARD:

–for Gloria Swanson

On the thin rope between desire and madness

strung above her moldering once opulent mansion

the old movie queen struts over and over

stumbling at times but recovering quickly,

forever to crave the lights and cameras,

those wonderful people out there in the dark,

always prepared for the next close-up,

pistol in hand to hush anyone who’d dare say

the audience left decades ago.

Gloria, aka the great Norma Desmond,

you must have realized how much alike

the two of you. And knew about the rush

of lingering wishes

even as death’s footsteps rapidly approach

from just beyond camera range.

OVERHEARD IN HUNGARY, 2008

It was better before the revolution.

We had jobs, houses, food, didn’t need

to think much. In fact, thinking was banned

beyond small daily decisions—

shall it be cabbage or potatoes,

potatoes or cabbage?

Rocked in steel cradles that stanched

our crying before it began

we knew exactly what to do: a few

hosannahs and hymns to satisfy

our stiffly uniformed guards,

If restless we could take the cure

in spas vast as Roman circuses,

cared for by nurses with lions’ claws.

SPINOZA. IRENE, AND THE FUR BLANKET

My friend Irene had a real fur blanket

big enough to cover both of us

when we pushed our cots together

at summer camp,

rescued from Berlin by her parents,

forced to leave in ’38.

Alone now and cold as the snow

where I lost a silver bracelet

sledding in Central Park with Irene

I think of Spinoza the Lens-Grinder,

expunged in 1656 by the Amsterdam rabbis

for daring to break from Jewish tradition,

an act which might upset the good Burghers

who welcomed Jews forced to flee

Portugal and Spain,

doctors, philosophers, bankers–

as long as they kept their distance.

Bento, the name Spinoza preferred,

continued to celebrate

pure reason over blind faith

all the while grinding the finest of lenses—

sharp enough, I’m sure, to help me find

Irene and her blanket, my bracelet,

but it’s already too late.

AUNT MILLY’S EYES

(Upon visiting my 96-year-old aunt in Revivim, Israel)

As if trapped in the headlights

of a fast approaching car

the eyes of my aunt

first strike me as fearful,

then hurt with a hint of anger:

how dare you, the living, let me get so old?

The sun’s angle on the red

and gold stripes of her camelhair rug

shifts so slowly it seems to remain the same

like my aunt herself, a small sculpted figure

in the same chair, day after day,

opening and closing a book

she says with a laugh that

she’s read many times.

I admire the Brooklyn night- scene

on the opposite wall

for which she’d won first prize

in a city-wide contest, 1929.

Oh that? But it’s so dark. . .

My life is over, there’s

nothing more I want,

yet I don’t want to die,

her voice rising

but not the least defiant.

The bus is almost here, time

for one last glance, her eyes

now sage-green as the eyes

of ancient statues, their gems

long ago gone, but the eyes wide-open,

serene as  a Rembrandt portrait.

Bridal veils above Jerusalem

but no fiddlers on rooftops

they’ve all returned to Vitebsk

in search of Chagall

or emigrated to America

<!–

EVERYTHING LOOKS SMALLER

An old man with a cane

walks towards the Old City

dragging his shadow behind him

though the domes no longer excite him

nor Jerusalem’s honey-colored stones.

The Wailing Wall seems smaller

each time he manages to return,

the climb up and down more difficult.

He has weightier problems now

than ruins and wars, history’s infinite cruelty:

keeping enough food and candles on hand,

the burning pains in his bones,

wondering who will care for him when he’s dead

or, worse, when he’s dying—

If only he could return

to the bustling markets of the Lodz Ghetto

before he fled just in time, ca. 1941,

but, like everything else,

they too would seem smaller than memory.