On the ride to Uncle Billy’s funeral
my father was holding forth on aging —
all the details —so banal, seemingly momentous —
the massive strain of psychic dead weight
even slowed the car down near Sebastopol.

“Who gets what when it’s my turn?”
he barked. He had run out of breath
between thinking and speaking that macabre idea.
My sisters wasted no time calling dibs
on needlepoint artwork, tchotchkes and kitchy utensils.

I was surprised neither of them claimed
The Gold Bowl, which was really brass,
with raised Chinese lettering we never translated.
My mother fought her brother over it,
like everything else, for seventy shared years.

It held house keys and the mail
for generations. Infants went for slow spins,
their diapered bottoms filling out the diameter.
Visitors’ eyes were drawn to it as
they came through the family’s front door.

“I’ll take the Gold Bowl,” was my claim,
bringing the first silence since landing at
SFO. My father grinned and my sisters
winced. I thought of Billy and his
sister and wondered if my father did.

1944 ~ 1984 ~ 2024

Forty years after the Allies turned the war

~

I met Michel in Venice’s Ghetto Ebraico,
before a train to Hamburg to see
my college roommate, who spent her evenings
hosting European friends all like Michel, all
in love with her and New York.

At a café near the zoo, people
silently watched as I entered, unlike the
old Deutscher Mann who passed me on
an iron Hauptbahnhof staircase, grumbling Ficken Juden,
just loud enough for it to pierce.

~

Today, tourists stand mute near the salt-worn
graves in Lido’s bounded grounds. The Hauptbahnhof
is free of old soldiers. Strident students
encamp in the shadow of Alma Mater,
chanting their furious words, immune to time.

Y2K

A few years after Y2K fizzled, my son
was in his Star Wars period and
introduced to the pace of CD-ROM software
games, while I grew angry at modems
and the used car prices at Compaq.

He exercised his imagination through his thumbs.
Luke and Darth crashed their light sabers.
A seven-year-old somehow absorbed Luke’s righteous Force,
suddenly voiced his new truth: Daddy, I
wish I could do that to you.

Battery Park City, NY, February 1993

The day of the first WTC attack,
I stood with my infant son, watching
the chaos at the maw of the
cavernous wreckage, and the stunned, the staggering,
wrest courage from the debris around them.

Smoke, ash, and a rancid chemical stench
floated across West St., drifting effortlessly toward
the Hudson, toward us both, settling, without
irony, at the foot of Lady Liberty,
anointing my new son’s brow with sorrow.

Dias De Los Muertos

randomly fill the calendar, hosting past
due notices, dreams where mom or dad
or some other ghost knocks at my
front door, bringing unwanted reminders instead of
something sweet that most children would want.