Grief
For Marsha Singer,
It was the best of times the worst of times, Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Ballerinas in training, I’d wait in the dressing room,doing my homework till you walked in the door.
Your trek from Flatbush was long but there you were,
your blue-sky eyes flashing as we hugged,
our words brimming over with the day.
We were twins, set on a road to leave school
at sixteen, live together in New York and
audition for the Metropolitan Opera Ballet.
Mum was the word, but we lived with it as a given.
Oh god, it was not to be. The British teacher who trained
the young Margot Fonteyn, said my hyper extended knees
would not create the straight angles needed for ballet.
I went from loving what my body could do to abandoning it.
Marsha, I don’t know what happened but
you too left this tight beautiful world where
the only thing that mattered was using our bodies
to unveil the essence of our souls.
Revery
My brother reminisces about our grandparents’dining room furniture, resurrects ghost Nana
with her blue-rinsed hair, blue eyes sparkling like
the angels circling her chiming crystal and Spode
china, my Pinsk Nana, who never had shoes until
she was five, fingering a plate at sixty still musing
on how her bad luck had turned. Early on, she hitched
a ride with young Grandpa who’d trekked from Minsk
to Ellis Island and cleaned spittoons till he worked
his way into tobacco and then into New York real estate.
Gramps, whose birthday we celebrated in March though
he had no birth certificate. He called my grandmother
Mama because his mom died in childbirth
when he was four and his stepmother, reported
my Parisian cousin, used to chase him with a knife.
Nana and Gramps, thank you—
for providing for our family,
for sheltering me in high school
when I was a hopeful ballerina,
and for the table and chairs which spread their wings
over the Hudson, the beauty of the river with its
mutable sky paintings shoring up the sense of safety,
an antidote to my door-slamming home.
I let go of those multi-colored flowers splashed over
the high-back ochre chairs where they greeted my tush
every morning after I’d peck Gramps who
might be heading to the races with a friend
“in coal.” I let go of Nana to whom I blow a kiss
as she’s on the phone hondling Abe the butcher
about last night’s stringy lamb chops.
