The Long Arc of Envy
How an Atomic Bomb Makes a Mushroom Cloud
Calling All Martyrs
You never forget your first
celebrity plastic surgeon, or
your first Holocaust survivor,
and he was both, although occasionally
defrocked for theft and self-aggrandizement,
like the Jews in the Sorbonne, Jews blocked from Harlem,
Jews everywhere although to quote a famous archaeologist,
this is not a quest for the twelve lost tribes
of Brooklyn. This is about his daughter,
against whom I squared off on the playground
as we compared the super powers of our fathers.
Mine could change the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk,
the cartography of Vietnam,
his ancestors into Paris assassins.
But her father could create Jews who passed
without crystal stairs, their families in tact,
with their lines of credit, plus free access to
holidays that have been the bane of every
Landsman’s existence since the Immaculate Conception.
Immaculate nothing: he took his wife and made certain
her nipples always matched her lipstick, that her chin bore
no relation to Spanish kings who screwed themselves
sterile through incest. Today her features are shiny
and disheveled, like a prize fighter in retirement, but
this family all remains variously alive, unlike my parents.
My father the American who envied his unassimilated status.
My mother who consulted the dictionary
as her days shortened, to remind herself of what she lost:
definition. Sur*real, things of or have the character of being
sur*re*al*is*tic; as in how it was when I discovered the whereabouts
of my old school chum, with her bullet proof vest-body type
working for a department of correction. I’ve been around
and know what that means and there’s no politically correct way
to say it. I know what it means for her career
and the co-morbidities of her womanhood:
unlike me, she has no one to watch her
as she rises to reach
orgasm.
How an Atomic Bomb Makes a Mushroom Cloud
Something about convection,
pitch and parry of a conflict between
temperatures,
as if spontaneously commanded
by the push of a button,
or the “ON” switch in the basement
of the department store where
my mother worked on Hollywood Boulevard.
Something not supposed to happen
save for the most dire of circumstances:
divorce, warfare or illness,
smoke and steam
in the shape of a woman pouring out
of her clothes in the fitting room mirror
as her daughter on the outside
threatens boredom from the highest intervals.
Some scientist friends once saw a ring around
a rainbow and spent hours debating
what it could be,
and I thought of heavy water weighing down
palm fronds and leaf fingers, quicksilverish
gelatin, or liquid with perspective.
All the things that may or may not come
to pass,
such as buying magnets or grips for the Oriental rugs
“as seen on T.V.!!!!”
scams and miracles to prevent them
from slipping
when my mother’s unsteadiness
and the brittle cancers growing in my sister
would make fatal work
of their walking.
Calling all martyrs:
Your mother’s looking for you
because you’re supposed to be home
at a certain crystalline hour, when
the last acorn-shaped street lamp
steams out the dark like a froth.
Because God isn’t in the details.
He’s in the paradoxes. Somewhere
between chaos and unification
of burdens and theories, like the girl
who loves me only when she is
drunk. At the funeral we last
attended, she ran to the deceased’s
father to tell him how ravishing
the soul of his daughter was,
though she chose to live a life
deliberately remote from ours.
This decision was the end of all
youth, as we thought we might
not be together, but never opposite.
Or perhaps God is somewhere
within the spacing and hesitations
in cursive lettering that stops,
like in my grandfather’s inability
to hold a pen as his hands shook
with the Parkinson’s. He was practically
printing out the statements
before my mother took over all
the accounting. There God may
have thrived, between green
lines drawn without conflict,
until my mother’s handwriting
deteriorated without disease,
but in the same tranquil pattern
as her father’s.
Jane Rosenberg LaForge's next full-length collection of poems, Daphne and her Discontents, will be published by Ravenna Press in either late 2016 or 2017. Her chapbook collection, In Remembrance of the Life, is coming from Spruce Alley Press this summer. More information is at jane-rosenberg-laforge.com
