Barbara Lefcowitz Poetry

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.

SOLITUDE

Solitude is un-American.

A hostess seats me in a diner’s darkest corner, close to the freezer where

the illegal workers must flee to avoid arrest in the next police raid.

It’s a disease that demands distance and a sterile mask, as if I am a pariah,

a crazy recluse, a mockery of the Judeo-Christian One and Only God.

Doesn’t anyone in America know that Sartre said hell is other people? Thus implying that solitude is paradise.

But that would make it too French. Wordsworth considered it the bliss beheld solely by the inner eye. Too British. The serenity of the solitary fisherman? Definitely un-democratic.

Many confuse it with loneliness: the abandoned mirrors in fitting rooms at 3 a.m., the midnight traffic light whose mates have stopped blinking.

On the jukebox Elvis asks if I’m lonesome tonight.

Not at all, I answer, though nobody hears me. For solitude cannot speak except to itself. Nor can it be smelled or touched. But it can all too easily be disrupted.

Solitude is my muse.

QUESTION MARKS

The dead embody questions that defy answers

no matter how often we might ask, no matter

how trivial, like what was our neighbor’s name

when we lived in Boston, or how frantic: did you

really love me, or only your own desires?

Not so different, after all, from the living

who with few exceptions hide their own questions

in their minds’ attics, the impossible questions:

why was I born, what is time, fate, truth–

retrieving the boxes only when their mildew

so overwhelms they must toss the collections

down some dark pit where unsolved riddles repose

with forgotten names, gods and fossils,

the dots that marked the ends of old assertions.

CHINESE NEW YEAR PARADE, PARIS, 2010

Bamboo sticks suspended mid-air,

les batteurs are frozen,

along with their red drums.

The cymbal players too

and the girls in sleeveless red and yellow frocks;

from the exhaled breaths

of spectators along le Rue de Payenne

coils of smoke constantly create

a double helix with the streams of ice

from congealed firecrackers, hover

high as the balconies where a few residents

peer out, their eyes becoming distant stars.

Only the dragon moves, slithers with no end in sight,

blocking the street so none can escape.

I fear I will suffer a morte de froid

(O it sounds so much better in French! )

hands stiffening despite three sets of gloves.

When will a gong ring out to end

this cauchemar, this dream that might not be

a dream at all.

BLUE SNOW

Despite the blue patina

and the prospect of discovering

what grows below its deepest layers

I don’t want to risk descent

into the 10 foot snow dune

outside my front door,

the wind shifting its curves

so the dune becomes frozen surf

that parts to reveal

a pregnant belly dancer

in pre-dawn darkness

tinged violet in the weak sun–

which may be just a memory of sun.

I try to clear a path, using a dustpan,

shaggy broom, a few empty cans.

But why bother when I can admire from within

the intricate surface-glints,

strings of ice forming chains

for the solid gems beneath.

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

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  stones

rise briefly to the top.