Image by
Frank
There’s a portrait of me with
cousin Frank, he’s six I’m three,
taken at my first home in the USA,
a stone apartment building at Van
Cortland Park, bedrock segue to
the rest of our lives which, in
Frank’s case, took a shorter arc
than mine. He too was a Vienna
escapee, liked goldfish, played the
violin, loved his Uncle Sam, my
dad, like him grew up handsome
as a man can be. He climbed that
legendary ladder, married, raised
a family and suddenly, grew old,
white-haired at fifty, he was wheel-
chaired, eighty-five, and died. Was
he a victim of some riptide in his
DNA, some aftershock of dread—
The scientists are mystified.
Random Access Memory
they call it. Cerebellar hit and miss—what pops
to mind sporadically, old scenes that haunt the
hidden places in my brain, colors that blazed
real now gone again, expunged by age of four,
these phantom flickers of my browned-out past,
stuck in gay Vienna’s underbrush, rooted in old
gristly miseries of guilt and shame. I want to
game these dogged demons of amnesiac intent,
to grasp old shreds of memory, pull out the bits,
unbolt a creaking opening to what my parents
couldn’t speak, crash their silence on that access
to the past, sniff warily these festering wounds
of lives gone wrong, thrum the wires of their
endless barbs—attentive to the broken tongues.
Self-Portrait as Paintbrush
I’m not large in the broadly brushed scheme of myself,
shadows and vanishing delineations scrubbed soberly to
meet my silhouette in layers—lucent gray, bluish silver
in a Jewish limbo not delimiting the mass but losing black
in black so no breast breaks from the purple crush of trunk
spilling in the piece where shape of Hebrew heart meets
rush of minor tone above a scrape of blush carnation,
disarray of slashes breach the pale insinuation of a face
caught in layers like old film in slow exposure or like schist
eroded; indigo for eyes that trap observers mesmerized.
Passover brought plagues that fell on ancient seed which
scattered when the bedrock swayed. But hardy Paintbrush
rooted in a backyard plot behind the cellar door broke through—
its bract of firey red transplanted from its Alpine bed, now
sucking sustenance from shriveled grit and scratch around
the thistle roots beneath our New World gravel pit. With rain
and squint of sun the weed grows wild as crimson shows
and gathers focus to reveal the passage of a shoot to flower—
Paintbrush glows and shadows flow as form elides with sound—
emigré from Austria and dirty Jew mulched into the portrait
of a tis of thee for all posterity.