Miriam Bat-Ami
Deep is Deep He left one day. “He is dead,” I said. I could still smell him on the jacket that I took to wearing, his hairbrush that I held to my nose, the musky scent of his scalp inside the bristles that I inhaled. I smelled him in the bedroom whose windows I had shut so I could keep him enclosed. His lingering presence grew fainter each day until he was gone altogether, and you came into my life. These are the things you gave me: your hand to hold, your arms I could grab to lift myself up, your hair that my fingers could comb through. You gave me your shirts. I walked around inside your smell. When I curled into your back and wedged my arms under yours, you gave me a way to reach down into a place I forgot existed. And joy. And joy is the sound of laughter: yours, quiet; mine, loud, shared stories. “I jumped out of planes,” you said. “My stepfather was an ass. I never knew my dad. I was born in Missouri. I milked a cow and drank cream from the tops of glass bottles. There were Christmases when nothing was under the tree. Presents were what everybody in my class got but me.” You gave me the sounds of a hurt child who became a boy who read books and pretended he was Tom Sawyer who became a cop, the chief of police, who rose in the Army ranks from private to sergeant to lieutenant, captain, lieutenant colonel retired from duty. "These are the pictures of my sons, my daughter, grandkids and two great-grandbabies,” you said. I could not add up the sums of your life. “I was born in Pennsylvania,” I told you. “My parents loved me. We were very religious, and I felt, at times, it was better to be a boy than a girl. In my dreams I was an animal or a boy. I wasn’t myself until I left my home, but I never left entirely. I felt safe back then. As a teen, I rode horses and danced the Twist, the Monkey, and the Mashed Potato. I studied a lot and have multiple degrees." I rattled off academic ranks: from teaching assistant to teaching fellow, instructor, assistant professor, associate professor, and, finally, full professor. I climbed up the ladder until I retired from duty. “These are the pictures of my sons and their wives, my three grandkids." You could not add up the sums of my life. And when I asked about our future, you answered, “Let’s enjoy the present one day at a time.” When you asked about depth, I answered, “Wet is wet, and deep is deep.” We jumped out of our separate planes and flew through the air together. Then we talked about death and all our missing, who is buried where and where we’d be until sadness and missing overcame us, so you played your harmonica. I read you my stories. We held each other above the graves. How deep is deep? When giving and taking become the same kind of sharing; anticipation, the pleasure of waiting to hear your voice, to see me at the door, make room in our closets, our beds, the drawers of our souls. “Tell me you love me,” you requested. “I love you,” I said, first timidly as if I wasn’t sure how love would taste, then more and more. “Tell me you love me,” I demanded as if I were asking. “I love you,” you answered. And love was as deep as it needed to be. When I couldn’t measure the when of change: how far down we had gone, if we went up instead. Was it too late or too soon? Missing became deeper than deep, and I called out your name. I called out your name. Late in the day, love rises like the moon with you inside of me. Early at night, love sets like the sun with you inside of me. There is no yardstick to measure the length of longing, the breadth of giving, the pain of losing the joy of living, how it feels when someone leaves all at once, joy hugging his heels. The wind blows. The clothes on the line are wet and flapping, Love rests between us, and you call out my name. You call out my name. ** The Shrouded Sky All things darken and swell: the goldfinch’s dusky autumn feathers, no longer coloured like the mid-day sun; the barn horses with coats that have grown so thick that I know it will be a bad winter. Soon they will look like old men: bearded jowls, hair, sticking up everywhere. Fall weighs on us all. Grackles gather in groups that could fill a convention centre. Canada geese stretch themselves out across the shrouded sky. ** A longer version of this poem appeared in the author's collection, Measuring the Marigolds (Caffeinated Press.) ** Bird of Prey I had driven a different route home from the barn: not past the usual vacant retail stores and for lease signs or the small coffee shops with blinking neon lights signaling fluctuations of failure followed by small successes. I took the long way through the curves of country roads that cut through fields, small bodies of water, and thinning forests where wildlife continues to thrive. There is always an element of surprise in this longer journey—times when I’ve seen deer bolting out of the bush; vultures preying on decaying possum and raccoons; and a duck with her ducklings, lined up and moving from wood to water. Often, I’ve seen a whole group of turkey half running, half walking noisily past my car and into the brush again. My joy is heightened, surrounded as it is by the mundane: the one-car bridge, the yield signs, the two horses lazily chewing on bits of grass and dirt in the corner lot where I slow down and turn. In those final few miles, I have a tendency to speed up like some rank horse, racing back to the barn. I drive past the stone lion who eternally guards a larger stone house and the mailbox which, from the bottom of the last hill home, looks like a deer. Often, too, a brief communion occurs between me and someone walking: signals that country people give to each other in passing along a rural road. I nod to the young woman running with her German shepherd or wave my hand at the elderly man with ski poles and walking-stick legs. On his head is a faded fishing hat that, like the man, has weathered many storms. On this particular day I had already passed the house where the two horses grazed, their heads bowed by the renewed presence of growing grass. I was driving on auto-pilot as one does on a well traveled road when a hawk swooped down, nearly swiping my car’s roof. It veered off only to circle again. Sighting a bird of prey is one thing. Sighting a bird who seems intent on attacking the roof of one’s car, or quite possibly the occupant inside, is another. I was sitting securely protected by hardened plastic and metal. I should have felt nothing but amusement. Yet the attack was so sudden, so unusual, and I was alone on a country road that, all at once, felt unknown. The hawk made its second noiseless pass close enough so I could see its hooked beak. I sensed the timidity of small creatures momentarily paralyzed by the force of silent wings, sharp eyes, and outstretched talons. What is it about my car? About me? The car stood, mindless as all molded material is, until the raptor turned to a neighbouring field and more promising prey. Fingers, trembling, I started the ignition and focused on the familiarity of the well-traveled road. Then, an old memory beat its wings against my skull and glided around overgrown pathways. * I was eleven or twelve, dwelling in-between childhood and adolescence. Everything was yearning to be somewhere else. One day I wanted to roll down the hill in my grass-stained dungarees. The next, I made myself into a statue. In my smart-belted shift that swung out from the waist, I did not move a muscle. Beyond all other outfits, I loved this off-white dress that I wore for special occasions. Thickly warm, woven with woolly balls of yarn that I used to twist around my fingers, the dress felt like expectation, the kind of anticipation that built up inside of me when I stuffed lamb’s wool inside my toe shoes in preparation for a recital. A tall teen, often towering over boys my age, I frequently slumped forward, my shoulders seeking comfort in their closeness to my chest. In that special dress, though, I stood erect as it clung to my knees and creased in all the right places. When I walked, I was on my way somewhere so what happened felt extra sad including the fact that I ended up shoving my favourite outfit to the back of my closet. For several years it hung there, hidden from view, away from the closet light gathering up stray dust. It occurred at the close of Yom Kippur, ironically the one day in the Jewish calendar when one reviews past deeds and atones for misdeeds. I stood outside our caterer’s house after nearly twenty four hours of fasting. For much of it I had thought of exactly what I’d eat to break the fast. Those last few hours, as I often did, I watched my father, the Rabbi, standing on the pulpit. His face was the colour of a unripened pear. I was afraid that he’d faint in front of the congregation or he’d fall on his knees during the section when one was required to stand. Yom Kippur was always a trying time for me made even worse because, that year, it fell on an unusually hot autumn day. My special dress absorbed moisture like a sponge so that it grew heavier with each slow passing hour. Layers of sweat had dried behind my knees and under my arms. My toes itched inside my silk stockings. I wanted to lie flat under a cool sheet and drink the tallest glass of water. Everything stuck to me in all the wrong places. I left the temple just as services ended. Clumped to each other, people rolled slowly down the aisles. If I were quick enough, I could pick up our break-the-fast platters from the temple caterer across the street and have it ready when my family got home. Every year my parents ordered food so that my exhausted mother would not have to cook after a day of fasting and herding us kids back and forth to temple. I knocked at the door. Waited. Knocked more. The house seemed to have aged from the last time I had picked up an order. The stairs were worn. Once they had been painted green. Now they looked grey. The curtains were closed. An old rocker leaned against the window. I felt sad. Hunger gnawed inside my belly. I wanted to be on my way, running up the hill to our home and chewing on a pastry. I wanted to be around my brothers and sister who made a lot of noise and never listened to a thing that I said. I knocked loud enough to make my presence felt but not too loud. Soon the caterer for our temple would come out. This year, like all the others, she’d have our break-the-fast platters ready, not with rich food for that wasn’t good after fasting. Light delectable treats that made you feel fasting was worth it. There’d be all my favourites bites of fish: herring in sour cream, lox curled around cream cheese, and gefilte fish balls. A whole platter would be devoted to old European pastries like rugelach and crunchy tagelach coated in honey that seeped through the hardened crevices. I loved tagelach. Once a year, on my mother’s birthday, my grandmother sent these sweet treats squeezed together in a coffee can just for my mother—no one else. Late at night, she’d sneak down to the kitchen and slip her fingers into honey. Every so often, my siblings and I checked the can, its contents slowly disappearing, but we never touched her present. At the end of the fast, though, we all got tagelach. Every year they came with this note: Have a sweet year. I was turning to go when her husband called out. “Come in. It’s open.” He sounded like an old dog who had no bark left, and I stood there for a second or two feeling unsure as if what had always been known and understood had lost its familiar scent. But there were the platters. The desserts. The lox, curling around the cream cheese. The honey that I’d lick off my fingers. I had been here before. Knew the caterer with her fat face and fatter smile. Her husband who mostly stayed in the house. They were old people. Old temple people. Through the hall that smelled like boiled chicken I walked. He looked boiled, too, sagging inside a dirty old chair that had once been blue but was mostly grey. “Come here,” he said. I crept over to him like I was playing “How Many Steps Before the Queen,” and someone had commanded me to take ten baby steps. When I got up close, I smelled chicken and whiskey. “Sit on my lap,” he said. His eyes bulged behind thick glasses. Near him were the platters. I could see the treats. Under the saran wrap they were tightly held in place. I thought about water, how my dad hadn’t fainted, how I should move somewhere, make giant steps. Underneath the slim slip and the thick dress that had made me think of lamb’s wool, ballet shoes, and Swan Lake princesses his hands caressed forbidden places and the New Year split itself open, smelling sweet and sour and old. Then, as if I had suddenly heard a class bell, I jumped off, grabbed the two trays, and raced out the door. * Years later, I was walking alone past the corner grocery store. My purse swung against my hip. Inside was a check from work. “I made it,” I repeated to myself. Another eighty hours in a mid-Wilshire office where I sat looking busy. I was thinking about how two weeks’ work was fourteen days and so many hours of eating away at myself. Still, the check felt heavy like gold. I was happy for my marriage and weekends. He came from behind, dragged me down the darkened street, and I held on. It was my money. My money. We cursed each other saying “Bitch!” and “Bastard! I was afraid that the strap cutting into my shoulder would break; he’d run away with the bag. I felt the hard sidewalk, my bruised arms, his growing surprise: this woman was not easy prey. Near our home, he released his hold and vanished as quickly as he appeared. That evening I clutched my purse and cried the long block until I stood next to the apricot tree in front of our small garage apartment. The tree was laden with ripe fruit I had picked from our bedroom window early that morning. I breathed in its sweet summer smell and laughed. Clear and loud through the darkness of familiar and well-traveled roads. ** Part of this appeared in the author's collection, Measuring the Marigolds (Caffeinated Press.) ** Shoveling Snow A winter of snowstorms, minus-degree wind chills, reprieves that last a day or two so we can catch our communal breath from the accidents on the interstate, the pile-ups, slide-offs, school closings; the solitary shootings of men gone mad, fires that spring up, blazing out of control, young mothers holding fast to their children, teenagers who just got their licenses and failed to judge the dangers of black ice. On the local 6:00 o’clock news they appear in blown up wallet-size photos meant to be passed around to forever friends, cherished teachers, relatives, and parents: boys just pressed into manhood, their hair combed back, trying to smile seriously; young women, thrusting out chins and hips, letting you into what they’ve just discovered, what they are about to discover. They all look so hopeful. I vow to stop watching the news. Winter is hard enough. For a day or two, while the sun shines on the slicked-back snow, I push along my shovel as I saw my son do. Exert the least energy possible. Lift only what you must. Liquid drains from my nose and eyes. Brittle patches of snow soak in spit and snot. Layer after layer falls onto the snow bank that shifts with the wind sending bits of ice and snow back in my face again. ** Miriam Bat-Ami is a retired university English professor. She has published four books for children and adolescents. These include a picture book (Sea, Salt, and Air, Macmillan), two middle grade novels (When the Frost is Gone, Macmillan, and Dear Elijah, Farrar), plus a YA historical fiction (Two Suns in the Sky, Front Street/Cricket) that won the prestigious Scott O’Dell Award. She has also published articles in educational journals such as Children’s Literature and Children’s Literature in Education. She was the Grand Prize Winner of the Maine Media Workshops and College Dreams contest. Her book Measuring the Marigolds (Caffeinated Press) is a collection of nature poems. |