Poetry Portfolio

Half Jewish

On friday evenings at sundown
my torso attends sabbath
at the local synagogue despite the fact
that my right elbow just uses
yom kippur as an excuse
to take a day off work and my
collarbone chose not to have
a barmitzvah because hebrew lessons
interfered with baseball practice but the
bone that juts out slightly from my
left wrist still feels guilty about
that time the chinese restaurant
accidentally served a bowl of pork
fried rice and I didn’t stop eating it even
after realizing what it was, meanwhile
my legs wake up early sunday
mornings and put on a modest skirt
to attend services at st. mike’s where
they have all the latin rites
completely memorized but
choose not to take communion
because the scar on my right knee cannot
forgive all that business with
the new pope and is seriously
considering converting
to buddhism
even though my left hip insists
that it is much more complicated
than those chai-drinking
yoga-mat-toting-soccer-moms
seem to realize when they
compare their ‘namastes’ after their
shopping carts collide in front of the
organic frozen foods section of
the local supermarket before
they meander past the butchery
where various deities are
carefully selecting their favorite
portions of my body wrapped tightly
in saran so they can fry me in a pan and
serve me on a plate with a side of starch
for supper.
***

Grandmother

Who is she
this prominent subject
in our tales and anecdotes
of familial familiarity
that left us all bruised and
bloodied in the wake of
her absence?
Where is she
hiding among all
these recipes hand written
on browning butter-
scented notecards with
disembodied thumbprints
stenciled in wheat-flour
within the margins?
Why is she
carving notes of
goodbye to herself
into the deep muddy
swamp banks of her
befuddled memory
with broken sticks and
warm pebbles fished out from the
bottoms of her shoes?
What is she
in relation to
who I am and
what I am
and what I will be
and did she have a part
in the formation of any
of these parts of me?
***

Plastics.
You said in your last letter
that all you want out of life
is to sit around
and read books.
Hang in there—
soon it will all be over
and you’ll have the rest of your life to read books
and there will be no rush.

I wish I could go back to when I hadn't read so many books
so I could read them for the first time.
I read most of my books—
the best books—
when I was traveling through Darjeeling in my twenties—
there was a view of Everest through the clouds—
terrifying—
why anyone would try to climb it—
I stayed at a British hotel
a renovated temple—
there were long strands of orange blossoms
white faced monkeys were swinging from the branches
and some long-haired girls
from California—
around eighteen years old
wearing white wool shawls
lobbing a shuttlecock back and forth—
I would see them later
at dinner
with their chaperone
and Tantric yogi—
a guy in his late sixties wearing a giant diamond on one hand—
all in white wool shawls
and dipping spoons
in their water glasses.
I learned that, among other things
the girls were learning how to have
erotic experiences with the yogi without climaxing.
I looked at them in a different light after that.

Meanwhile
I was sketching elephant skeletons
and reading a paperback
of George Eliot's Middlemarch––
700 pages––
and I was tearing off pages
and leaving them behind as I went
because I was carrying two months of stuff on my back in a mailbag––
a shirt and skirt and jeans and a dress and an extra pair of shoes and 2,000 dollars in cash stuffed under my clothes.

That was a long time ago.
since then I have read novels slowly,
as if living inside them,
to break up my quotidian life.

Love,
Auntie Kathy