RESPITE IN A MINOR KEY

By Marilyn Hacker


I would like an unending stretch of drizzly
weekday afternoons, in a moulting season:
nowhere else to go but across the street for
bread, and the paper.

Later, faces, voices across a table,
or an autumn fricassee, cèpes and shallots,
sipping Gigondas as I dice and hum to
Charpentier’s vespers.

No one’s waiting for me across an ocean.
What I can’t understand or change is distant.
War is a debate, or at worst, a headlined
nightmare. But waking

it will be there still, and one morning closer
to my implication in what I never
chose, elected, as my natal sky rains down
civilian ashes.



(from Desesperanto)

CURL

by Anita Garriott

My son
cradled in the crook
of my arm
as I softly stroke
his light brown hair.

Curled into a snug
position.
So familiar.

His teenage body
is too big to fit
this scene comfortably,
though.

We haven’t lived
this pain
together yet,
my son and I.
Breaking up
with his first girlfriend.

I feel awkward, shy,
having this large male,
son or no,
on my bed.

Comforting him, though,
comes naturally.
The needs of the body
in pain
are the same
at two
twenty-two
or fifty-two.

I say nothing.
Just pat his back,
rub his shoulder,
stroke his hair.
What’s to say?
It’s all been said.

What’s left
is the furnace
that forces its heat
through every crevice
for him
and my sorrow
for him
and for her
and the almost guilty
pleasure of a mother
still able to soothe
a son hurt
curled against her.

Badges

by Anita Garriott

My son and I had just seen
his county psychiatric social worker.
I looked my normal self
portly
primped
highlighted hair in a flip
scrub clothes on
running over from my nursing job
to drive my son to his appointment.
He was dressed oddly
as he had been since he became ill.
Three hats.
All my necklaces.
He was wearing his old Boy Scout sash
the one with the badges
he had earned
Citizenship in the Community
Orienteering
Lifesaving
neatly sewn on.
And the Tae Kwon Do chest pad
and soccer shin guards
he had picked up at the Goodwill
he wore these too
talismans to protect himself
from the police
a fear he had developed
an irrational fear
the mentally ill often suffer from.

It was a version of the old party game
“someone told someone”
that there was a loony
dressed in combat gear
leaving the county building.
We walked out
into the lovely morning
the innocent scent of freesias
in the planter boxes
by the time we got to our car
we were deep in an action movie
ten squad cars roared up
surrounded us
the megaphone told us to
PUT YOUR BELONGINGS DOWN
S-L-O-W-L-Y
STEP AWAY FROM EACH OTHER
S—L—O—W—L—Y
TURN AROUND
we were faced with a posse
wide-legged stance
arms straight out
steadying the guns
pointed right at us.

My grasp of reality
now as tenuous
as my son’s
I couldn’t understand the scene
but those guns were real alright
safety locks off
pointed at vital organs
my prayers went to whatever god
was on call for the county buildings that shift
prayers for my son
prayers
that through the haze of his illness
and his fear of the police
he could follow the barked orders
V-E-R-Y C-A-R-E-F-U-L-L-Y
so the trigger fingers
would not twitch.
Their nickel badges glinted
in the bright morning sun.

Patted down
handcuffed
placed firmly in the back seats
of separate squad cars
behind the steel grids
told nothing
we had thirty minutes to dream
likely scenarios of why we were in
the situation we were in.

Oh, inch by inch,
they began to recede
believe “our story”
they brought out the poor social worker
her face the color of paste
pupils dilated
she looked ready to cry
she acknowledged
yes my son was her client
yes he was ill
yes he was where he was
supposed to be
she apologized over and over
as though it was her fault.
It was the only apology
we ever received.

My son was sick.
Not dangerous.
How many sick sons
sick daughters
have been held at gunpoint
maybe shot
for dressing oddly
while seeking help for their illness
their delusions – you know -
that the police are out to get them
while they put on their Boy Scout sashes
the ones with the badges
Citizenship in the Community
Orienteering
Lifesaving
neatly sewn on
while they buy up the world’s supply
of Goodwill Tae Kwon Do pads
soccer shin guards
to stop the bullets?

GREEN ELEVATORS

By Jean Nordhaus

I dream two old Jews washing dishes
in last night’s Japanese restaurant,
keening and kvetsching in Yiddish.
One sings a song the Nazis made him sing
rowing down the river past his village,
a Polish song of girls and love and soldiers.
The other hums along and weeps. What
are they doing here, out of time and place
two old DP’s, stirring my sleep? Their keening

wakes me to a windy courtyard in the projects,
where my grandmother’s babushka’d friends
would perch on winter afternoons, a flock
of black birds, blown in by hunger and war,
cliff-high walls of four apartment blocks
enclosing them (the halls identical, the elevators
color-coded so a child could not get lost.) On iron
benches they roosted, clucking and crying
in Yiddish, in English: In America,
there is so much to eat. We take home the food

we can’t finish: last night, foil caskets
of rice and fish, each wrapped like a gift
in a nest of bright scallions. Afterward
we put on our shoes and walked out,
into the night, the wind. Wind
still circles the globe, scattering lives
like tea-leaves. Three clocks strike
in the dark, each telling a different time. In my
grandmother’s halls, the elevators were green.


(This poem first appeared in the Gettysburg Review)