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)

Of What Do We Make Our Homes?

by Jean Nordhaus

Of wood. Of stone. Of earth. Of ice.

Some chicken wire, a few geranium seeds.

A mat. A stake. A shell. I knew a man

whose longing was his home. A woman

who built a nest in the wreckage of lust.

A child who lived in the house of her hands,

whose fingers were her only friends.

I knew a lover whose foundation stone

was flight. A tune that lodged all night

in a creaking limb. A penstemon

that pitched its tent in an open field.

A crested lark whose home was all

of Portugal. I knew a foot soldier whose flag

was winding cloth. His home

was in the ground. A prayer may be a home.

A wish. A vow. Some mansions are of sorrow,

some of hope. Of leaves. Of hay. Of wind.

I’ll build my house of skin. My roof of sky.

(This poem originally appeared in the Gettysburg Review)