Barbara Lefcowitz Poetry

FLESHY LEAVES

On this freakishly warm December day
I stand by a gray field
and think about the fleshy leaves
that must have suddenly sprung into being below

Thick as rinds, guardians of a bulb’s winter larder,
the leaves begin to flare out,  the bulb itself brimming
until it presses its spindly roots
through the  pin-size hole at the bottom
where they struggle to enter
the gray plot already hardened
by frosts that could render still-born
next spring’s bawling young blooms

But the minute heart of a flower-shoot
hidden deep inside the bulb
begins to quiver, put out vessels
thin as silk threads

Soon I imagine thick stalks will burst forth
spread to reveal a tulip
red as the earth’s first bloody fruits
and large as the eye-shaped sun when it first set
over the first flaming hills

I look both backward and forward,
back  to ancestors
trekking their way towards me
across deserts, ahead to tropical forests
that some day long after I’m gone
will give way to ice-floes that nearly
form a lid above the cold gray sea far below.

12/1/11 draft

HIGH WIRE
shape and gender too distant
to discern
a figure moves along a high wire
peering  down on my life
as I were Niagara Falls
instead of a woman
with mounds of messy hair
suddenly it stops mid-wire
perfectly poised but inscrutable            
that old wish for stopped time, I must
remind myself
even the great Karl Wallenda lost his balance
fell to his death from a rope
onto a far below street in Sao Paulo

ESPRIT DE L’ESCALIER*

The escalator barely reaches midway

to the second floor

but it’s too late to reveal

the punch lines of the jokes

I could not complete. Or, worse, to make

perfect retorts to all the people

who’ve hurt me over the years,

now so far below

they might well be dead.

I’d better check, alert the store detective,

but the escalator’s ribbed steps

keep rising,

above the lingerie and summer purses,

designer dresses, the jammed together

bargain racks, mounds of footless shoes,

shoeless feet, the antiquated lamps

and chairs from the apartment I long ago fled.

That tree.  Yes it’s the ponderosa pine

from whose tickling branches I swung,

legs out front, then bending once again

until I suddenly flew off with no wings

to propel me.  Soon, too soon,

my whole life, including the sun-splashed hands

I tried to grasp in my child-bed

as if they were flames, stand

to the right, lady; you’re blocking

the rest of us, slowing

us down,

can’t you tell we’re busy

move now

or we’ll make a human basket,

bear you to where broken –off wings

spin in search of their bodies.

–*remark that occurs to a person  too late

DANCING LIKE CARMEN MIRANDA

I imagine she was happy

when she danced like Carmen Miranda

in front of the art- deco mirror

that took up a whole wall

in the dusky foyer

of the darkest apartment in Brooklyn.

My mother, I now grasp, in my own days

of thinly-striped light, despite her frequent gloom

my mother was a dreamer

and I’d gladly become her partner

(though she’d likely still frown

that I danced like a stick)

we might even sing some old tango

if that mirror hadn’t shattered decades back.

RADIATION 1

The Zapper’s head swings back and forth

steel eyes shooting beams into my flesh

I clutch a cold handle with my fist

and pretend I’m riding

the Coney Island carousel

but the music is bad

and the painted horses

all have broken legs.

THE SERPENT

What was I doing

when the serpent invaded my breast

probably nothing

more than eating a quince

buying a quart of mik

driving on a rain-slick road.

It was so small I didn’t feel its fangs.

For a long time it nestled inside a duct

between succulent lobules

admired its spirals, a pity not to clone itself–

a twin, a quadruplet, soon a swarm of cells

jostling inside the duct, pressing against its walls

and bursting through them

into new territory

wily as the asp

hidden in a basket of figs

Cleopatra consumed

until it wormed itself into her heart.

RADIATION 2

I’m the Statue of Liberty

knocked flat, right hand

grasping a cold strap

where once my torch

lit the way for all who would enter,

my crown split, more gaps than teeth, body

twisted into position

for the rays that will cross,

frolic, burn through my flesh

laid out on a rusting metal slab

while Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

plays over and over from the hollow harbor below.

TWIN

Cancer Girl, it’s your turn now,

brash, fecund, reckless,

all these years lurking inside me

until an errant gene set you loose,

my twin that never got older

than the day we came into being

in the same dark tunnel

enroute to the cave

waiting to welcome us.

But when we crossed its border

you split from me, burrowed

inside a wall, a speck of you

trailing a thread that entered

a thin pocket of my flesh

on which you feasted while rehearsing

for your grand exit

through a gap in the zipper,

wicked princess, strip-teasing

belle of the midnight ball,

common whore.

RED DAISY/I-POD

Every passenger is playing

with one or more devices,

so if I should slip

from my seat or keel over

they would just keep clicking.

To distract myself I’m reminded

how the most flamboyant

red daisy in my garden

doesn’t give a damn

about its bedmates

barely shakes a petal

when they droop or rust.

No matter if the flower

that bears his name bloomed first

or rose from the drowned bones

of Narcissus:

Selfishness

evolved from the vegetable world

long before headphones, wire stalks

and slick pods sealed it in

so firmly that nothing

could distract

from such distractions.

LATE AFTERNOONS

Pearlescent and tinged

a pale orange

late afternoons drift

past the deadline

for the day’s demands

defy time’s one-way rush

no matter the season

I am sitting with my mother

in the windowless foyer

put your lights out, put your lights out

the air-raid wardens shout

a superfluous order for that

always dark apartment, even when

bulbs would shine inside its shaded lamps.

My mother says don’t worry, the Japs

and Germans are far away. I believe her.

But when I’m in bed with a fever

and she pleads with me

to drink from a cup on the nightstand

I push it away, hot lemon tea

scalding the blanket but sparing my skin,

“The Land of Counterpane”

in my Child’s Garden of Verses.

HEGDESH

I wish I could ask my mother what she meant when she complained that my

house was a hegdesh. True it was far from immaculate.  I had better things to do.

But her sharp tone  made it sound like a curse, even though I’m sure

that at the same time she wept.

Decades later the word appears in a book about Jewish lore, its lavish sound breaking through memory’s edges enough to make me look it up.

No meaning fits. Neither the name of a room where beggars and kurveh slept

between a burial society’s  implements for washing and wrapping the dead

nor noun for hospital, poor house, Yiddish word for filth. Not until I find a temple offering of fruit and flowers that once placed within became perfect, even sacred.

Expressive of her bitter recognition: calling my house, and by extension myself, a hegdesh. I could never be such an offering, not beautiful enough

to fulfill her fantasy, relieve her sense of failure

to satisfy her repeated wish that I be perfect.

A curse on both of us.

_________________

*kurveh: Yiddish and Polish word for whore.