开场。黄色的煤雾在被污染的城市河流上散开，一个年轻的女孩划船，她焦虑的父亲在寻找尸体。葬礼肉类。聪明的被遗弃的孤儿。伟大的运动杀手在帐篷里生闷气。好像所有的故事都是从某人死去开始的。她母亲去世的时候，我母亲拒绝参加她的葬礼——事实上，她在她的帐篷里生了整整一年的气。我不知道为什么，她说，因为她太爱她的母亲了她不忍心看到医生，或者她的父亲，或者其他什么人眼睁睁看着她的母亲死去。“跟着你的圣，跟着甜甜的腔调;快点，悲伤的音符，倒在她飞舞的脚下。” She fogs things up, she scavenges the taint. Possibly that's the reason I write these poems. But they did speak: on the phone. Wept and argued, So fiercely one or the other often cut off A sentence by hanging up in rage--like lovers, But all that year she never saw her face. They lived on the same block, four doors apart. "Absence my presence is; strangeness my grace; With them that walk against me is my sun." "Synagogue" is a word I never heard, We called it shul, the Yiddish word for school. Elms, terra-cotta, the ocean a few blocks east. "Lay institution": she taught me we didn't think God lived in it. The rabbi is just a teacher. But what about the hereditary priests, Descendants of the Cohanes of the Temple, Like Walter Holtz--I called him Uncle Walter, When I was small. A big man with a face Just like a boxer dog or a cartoon sergeant. She told me whenever he helped a pretty woman Try on a shoe in his store, he'd touch her calf And ask her, "How does that feel?" I was too little To get the point but pretended to understand. "Desire, be steady; hope is your delight, An orb wherein no creature can ever be sorry." She didn't go to my bar mitzvah, either. I can't say why: she was there, and then she wasn't. I looked around before I mounted the steps To chant that babble and the speech the rabbi wrote And there she wasn't, and there was Uncle Walter The Cohane frowning with his doggy face: "She's missing her own son's musaf." Maybe she just Doesn't like rituals. Afterwards, she had a reason I don't remember. I wasn't upset: the truth Is, I had decided to be the clever orphan Some time before. By now, it's all a myth. What is a myth but something that seems to happen Always for the first time over and over again? And ten years later, she missed my brother's, too. I'm sorry: I think it was something about a hat. "Hot sun, cool fire, tempered with sweet air, Black shade, fair nurse, shadow my white hair; Shine, sun; burn, fire; breathe, air, and ease me." She sees the minister of the Nation of Islam On television, though she's half-blind in one eye. His bow tie is lime, his jacket crocodile green. Vigorously he denounces the Jews who traded in slaves, The Jews who run the newspapers and the banks. "I see what this guy is mad about now," she says, "It must have been some Jew that sold him the suit." "And the same wind sang and the same wave whitened, And or ever the garden's last petals were shed, In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened." But when they unveiled her mother's memorial stone, Gathered at the graveside one year after the death, According to custom, while we were standing around About to begin the prayers, her car appeared. It was a black car; the ground was deep in snow. My mother got out and walked toward us, across The field of gravestones capped with snow, her coat Black as the car, and they waited to start the prayers Until she arrived. I think she enjoyed the drama. I can't remember if she prayed or not, But that may be the way I'll remember her best: Dark figure, awaited, attended, aware, apart. "The present time upon time passëd striketh; With Phoebus's wandering course the earth is graced. The air still moves, and by its moving, cleareth; The fire up ascends, and planets feedeth; The water passeth on, and all lets weareth; The earth stands still, yet change of changes breedeth."