Dancing in Odessa

Author's Prayer If I speak for the dead, I must leave this animal of my body, I must write the same poem over and over for the empty page is a white flag of their surrender. If I speak of them, I must walk on the edge of myself, I must live as a blind man who runs through the rooms without touching the furniture. Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking "What year is it?" I can dance in my sleep and laugh in front of the mirror. Even sleep is a prayer, Lord, I will praise your madness, and in a language not mine, speak of music that wakes us, music in which we move. For whatever I say is a kind of petition and the darkest days must I praise.

But in the secret history of anger--one man's silence / lives in the bodies of others.

One would think of a boy laying syllables with his tongue onto a woman’s skin: those are lines sewn entirely of silence.

I will praise your madness, and in a language not mine, speak of music that wakes us, music in which we move. For whatever I say is a kind of petition, and the darkest days must I praise.

All that is musical in us is memory.

It was August. August! The light in the trees, full of fury.

It was April. The sun washed the balconies, April.

Then my mother begins to dance, re-arranging this dream. Her love is difficult; loving her is simple as putting raspberries in my mouth. On my brother’s head: not a single gray hair, he is singing to his twelve-month-old son. And my father is singing to his six-year-old silence. This is how we live on earth, a flock of sparrows. The darkness, a magician, finds quarters behind our ears. We don't know what life is, who makes it, the reality is thick with longing. We put it up to our lips and drink.

Time, my twin, take me by the hand through the streets of your city; my days, your pigeons, are fighting for crumbs—

Envoi You will die on a boat from Yalta to Odessa. —a fortune teller, 1992 What ties me to this earth? In Massachusetts, the birds force themselves into my lines— the sea repeats itself, repeats, repeats. I bless the boat from Yalta to Odessa and bless each passenger, his bones, his genitals, bless the sky inside his body, the sky my medicine, the sky my country. I bless the continent of gulls, the argument of their order. The wind, my master insists on the joy of poplars, swallows,— bless one woman’s brows, her lips and their salt, bless the roundness of her shoulder. Her face, a lantern by which I live my life. You can find us, Lord, she is a woman dancing with her eyes closed and I am a man arguing with this woman

For years, my sealed lips kept the intoxicating story of his madness. As he delivered his jokes, I laughed with my lips tight together. “Was Isaac drinking last night?” Marina asked. “I’m not sure! But when he arrived, he asked for a mirror to see who came home.

He did not mind being a character in my stories in a language he never learned.

I am a dance professor,” he introduced himself. “I know different dances—polka and tango and flamenco, a dance of lust and of joy, of wife or no wife.

A woman asks at night for a story with a happy ending. I have none. A refugee, I go home and become a ghost searching the houses I lived in. They say— the father of my father of his father of his father was a prince who married a Jewish girl against the Church’s will and his father’s will and the father of his father. Losing all, eager to lose: the estate, ships, hiding this ring (his wedding ring), a ring my father handed to my brother, then took. Handed, then took, hastily. In a family album we sit like the mannequins of school children.