Barbara Lefcowitz Poetry

SICK EGGS

You’d never know it

from their shape or color

but since the pandemic

sick eggs are quickly filling the beds

at the Hospital for Sick Food

everyday a new batch, hauled from box cars,

merry salmonella cavorting inside their shells.

The head nurse insists the eggs,

though uncurable, must remain in quarantine

despite the dreadful stench.

She herself would smash them

to relieve their pain, but that would be

against divine and natural law, evil

as destroying embryonic

stem cells. And what to do

with other sick foods,

blighted spinach, toxic turkey-burgers

and tuna now forced from their beds?

Purge them all forever, some claim.

Shoot them into space to join

the distant bacilli of cosmic dust.

Mate them with the wasted sperm

of old whales,  wet dreams,

just to see what happens.

But the government insists

new vaccines will soon arrive,

prosperity’s around the corner

along with  peace and happiness

free from the need to pursue it.

MOON FLUTE

Moon streams through the window

long enough to illuminate

the silver flute a young girl is playing,

briefly turning  a  sonata in D Minor

back to the dazzling moment of its birth.

OLD MASTERS

Born with all their music inside them

waiting to be released at the right moment—

how else account for the Old Masters,

Mozart, Haydn, especially the deaf Beethoven,

scores of unreleased melodies forever lost

when they died.  Yet more sad the extinction

of melody itself as I know it,

replaced by noise, a mutation of ears

that eludes me much as the squawking of crows and gulls.

SPECULATIONS

Muse: Let me speculate why lately you’ve become so silent.

You’ve taken to your bed, weary of feeding my voracious appetite for imprinting stray feelings and impressions, making the ordinary unique—e.g. my need to interpret the hieroglyphics of birch bark, rather than simply admire the black markings.

You’re angry.  Consider me a spoiled child who took you for granted, haven’t treated you well over the years despite all you’ve done for me.

You’re stuck inside a brainfold, confined by the literalisti, aficionados of the surface,

to a nunnery or purdah, free only to peek from a small window.

You’re bored.  Must I a-muse you?   <Medieval French,  tickle your fancy. > OK, but how?  You already know all my jokes and tricks, despite my fervent quest for originality. For that I apologize.  But am willing to try once more.

Until I hear from you, I’ll listen to the music of the wind, its meters, tempos, forms, final cadences before another day’s performance.  No two renditions ever the same.

***

FOR MARCIA

1935-2010

When I called you long distance

in your terrible last two years

you  often did not want to talk,

barely recognized my name

though we’d known each other more than 60 years,

shared what nobody else can ever know,

sometimes derisive jokes and  code words

we sustained long past youth.

Marcia, how could you abandon me in very late

middle-life, don’t you care how lonely I  began to feel

even before  I received word of your death

on far away Long Island. . .

It’s a trick, I want to cry out, like the ones

we used to play on the telephone long before

people had Caller ID—Is your refrigerator running?

Then go catch it; Do you have Prince Albert in a can? Then let him out.

On the bus to a summer camp where we waited on tables

you suddenly started to sing You’re the End of the Rainbow,

my Pot of Gold, a play upon the owner’s name,

and I joined in, my voice no match for yours.

The rainbow has dissolved in the dark June sky.

At least let me think you have soared

way over its arch, as in that old Judy Garland song.

You always said you could have been famous as she–

if your father didn’t think all singers were whores.

May these words you’ll never hear

make you laugh at the Angel of Death.

Marcia, my dear and oldest friend.

Te amo, Barbara

AND THE SEA RETORTS

As much as I love the constant surf

audible all over Raratonga

no matter if high or low tide

sometimes I cry out

stop already, at least prolong

the intervals between pounding waves

for without the spaces between notes

melodies and movements

there would be no music

without the pauses between beats, brief

semblances of death, the heart would not stir

the body’s currents

And the sea retorts

that when the pauses slow down

finally expand so you no longer breathe

its rhythms will go on as always

What can I do but turn

to the thin consolation of thoughts

about those who lived and died

before Beethoven, how the yet-to-be-born

will  listen not only to the Eroica

but much music yet to be made

Still I will never hear what my

primal ancestors sang

to celebrate the first waves

the  many love-cries that preceded my birth

And the sea retorts

with a rush of silence

MY  MARTINI  STORY

Long ago I set a story inside a martini

for a creative writing class, 1952 or ’53.

How sophisticated, surely

the professor would be impressed.

But his only comment was

Olive or twist?  Be precise.

I forget the characters and plot.

Some years later I graduated to vodka

straight from the freezer—a miracle!—

but these days I can tolerate only a sip,

besides hardly anybody drinks anymore,

at least the hard stuff; at a recent wedding

they served non-alcoholic wine, I guess

both bride and groom believed in getting high

from tai-chi and tantric breathing.

I tried my best to pretend and get a buzz

if only to drown out the terrible music—

O where are the foxtrots and tangos,

the roseate manhattans,  brandy alexanders,

near-virginal pink ladies?

I could set a new story in a can of Pabst,

but it would likely get crushed

and recycled,  reborn as a sheet of metal

suitable for making a knife, a rifle, wires

for a terrorist bomb.

Your tic in a box

more addictive than opium,

click all you want, even when

the screen goes dark

I own you, your digital tic,

your cyber Svengali,

whether online or off

I’m the love and bane of your life.

You may curse me and swear

to kill me once and for all

but it’s too late, I stalk you

everywhere, if not in one form

then another.

I forget nothing

though I confess that at times

I play tricks, like those cunning old gods

disguised now as memory’s jesters.

But we’re linked to the end

of your days. When your last

machine crashes, I will quickly

find another, sleek and sexier

than yours. If it’s any comfort,

all along I was just doing my job,

obeying orders that have nothing to do

with your clicks, your taps on my keys,

your relentless efforts to make me reveal

the right words, the right answers

to the riddles of nature and history,

the mystery of your birth, brief

time on this earth.

LOSS

“ I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. . . . Thoreau, Walden

All three of Thoreau’s losses symbolize the upper class pursuits he scorned, but may still have subliminally craved: the hound a reference to hunting, the bay horse to a fancy show breed, the turtle-dove to sentimentalized love, the sort embodied in chocolate hearts on Valentine’s Day.

Many of my own losses are more literal. When a kid, I lost more than one roller skate key on a Brooklyn sidewalk. One of a pair of matched earrings, pair of shoes, pair of gloves. More recently, someone stole my wallet on a crowded Paris Metro; far worse than the loss of cash was the loss of my credit cards—the absence of which forced me to refrain from all but essential spending.

So perhaps some losses are to the good, like the excision of minor body parts: a diseased appendix, inflamed tonsils, infected teeth, various moles and other

body-weeds. Less tangible: old obsessions, angers, crushes on long ago baseball players.

But my catalogue of less tangible losses is doubtless full of holes–themselves

losses– like the gap in a stocking called an ozcke (“stocking eye”) in Polish, so the threads that remain become fringe around a skeleton’s hollow sockets.

Virginity—i.e., literal virginity– lost only once, but often I have lost my way in the farflung cities and towns I have visited, and have forgotten even the map of the neighborhood where I have lived many years.

Indeed, the forgotten itself is a close kin of loss, Uncountable the number of ideas, words, ambitions and goals once deemed essential to my existence, uncountable the dreams and old desires. Games, of course. Bets. Muscle tone, visual acuity, shed cells. And in the semi-foreign country of high tech, a plethora of pins and passwords.

Like most people my age, I have lost family and friends, not only to death but divergence of interests and geographic locations. And unlike Proust, I have discovered no Madeleine, except perhaps occasional smells, whether scents

or stinks. Or some random music stuck in my brain’s jukebox, revived at least once by an old nickel I had forgotten to spend.

POLKA DOTS

White petals litter the path

outside my front door

round petals smaller than the fingertips

of a newborn child

but there are no bushes or trees

anywhere close

and no petals strewn along

my neighbors’ paths.

I pick one up to make sure

it’s not a pebble

dig a nail inside its flesh

which quickly disappears.

Yet I refrain from walking the path.

Could they be particles

no one has seen before—

or white polka dots

from my mother’s red playsuit, ca. 1942,

that I tried to grasp and pull loose

thinking they were buttons—

I study the petals from a distance,

until they sink into the mud

after sudden rain,

disappear like ashes

scattered off the Florida coast.

THE MATHEMATICS OF CAULIFLOWER

I despise cruciferous vegetables

but I bought a cauliflower today,

placed it on a stand

so I could study its head, a spiraling pyramid

of knobs, each a self-replicating fractal

that follows the Fibonacci sequence,

or golden mean, a design intricate yet

common as a cabbage or fern.

If unpicked it might have cloned itself forever,

invaded nearby fields and spread around the world

like the immortal cancer cells of Henrietta Lacks ,

extracted for study after she died.

Yet this pale green- white thing has a certain beauty,

reassures there’s an order in nature after all

no matter how it evolved.

How could I consume such a miracle?

So I moved it to a platter,

admiring but never tasting so much

as a knob within a knob

until the head turned rancid

and reluctantly I tossed it out, grateful

I never had to force myself to eat it.

SPINOZA, IRENE, LENSES

My friend Irene had a real fur blanket

big enough to cover both of us

when we pushed our cots together

at summer camp.

It was rescued from Berlin by her parents,

forced to flee in ’38.

Cold now as the snow

when many years ago 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 favoring reason over faith,

a daring break from Jewish tradition,

which might upset the good Burghers

who welcomed Jews forced to flee

Portugal and Spain,

doctors, philosophers, bankers–

as long as they enriched the coffers

and  kept their distance.

Bento, the name Spinoza preferred,

continued to celebrate reason

all the while grinding

the finest of lenses. Sharp enough

to find Irene, her blanket,

the  bracelet, at least to hone

memory’s edges.