You searched for Robert Hirschfield — 3rd Act Magazine

Being Part of The Afterlife of Bill Kenney

Victoria Starr Marshall — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 00:55:50 +0000

By ROBERT HIRSCHFIELD

It’s indecent to stalk the dead poet. I know that. Bill Kenney, 89 when he died, was the spring breeze in winter. Dying of cancer, he joked dryly, waxed humbly in his haiku about the smallness of our earthly moments, which made him seem impossibly large standing all alone out there on the cliff edge.

family album

the stories we tell

the camera

From Kenney’s posthumous collection, Tap Dancing in My Socks (Red Moon Press/2022), that poem can serve as a field guide for much of his work. His four volumes, all from Red Moon, are dotted with anti-stories about ourselves, in which our array of posturings are sanded down.

happy hour

we don’t mention

the cancer

I came late to Kenney, just as Kenney came late to haiku. He began writing haiku at age 72 (I started at 82.) We were octogenarians together wandering around New York at the same time. Had our paths ever crossed?

In his absence, they seem to cross every day, everywhere, especially when I am alone in the late hours of the night.

old photo

the stranger

I’ve become

Those moments in old age of feeling suddenly stranded. Feet not quite on the ground, but not yet under it.

There is a video of him reading from his first collection, The Earth Pushes Back (2016) in Santa Fe. Hairless, more or less, jaw slanted a bit, he read with a disarming simplicity.

“I have this problem,” he began, “you have it too: How do you begin to write a poem when so many poems have already been written? How do you begin to write a haiku when so many haiku have already been written?”

Inclusive, playfully conspiratorial, he had the audience immediately in his pocket. The wise vulnerable father everyone wishes they had. He explained at one point how the haiku he was about to read got written. A “butterfly” haiku. The winged warhorse of the genre.

“At first I wrote, butterfly/ how long/ will I remember you. A delightful moment with the butterfly. How long will it last? But looking at it on the page, I wasn’t satisfied. The butterfly just seemed to be lying there somehow. Then I thought what I really wanted to ask is butterfly/ how long will you/ remember me.”

The poet’s concern with mortality is culled gently from the unlikely subject of the butterfly. Seen from this unexpected angle, we get a deeply unsettling betrayal of our normal butterfly expectation of well-being. We get transformative insight.

“There was a tinge of mortality to whatever he touched,” Red Moon publisher Jim Kacian, remembers. “As though he knew his time in haiku wouldn’t be long.”

rainy autumn…

the last time we did it

a second time

An inadvertent “Ah” arises within me. I have arrived, with Kenney, at a mutual crossing point. Geriatric dating, where emptiness goes to fill itself with what has gone. Man’s last chance to play romantic roulette.

What, I wonder, would Master Basho make of the geriatric dating haiku? Open to all sorts of strange experiences himself, he may well have been amused or bemused.

But his more parochial successors, wedded to the standard haiku nature poem, would no doubt have been scandalized.

Having been where Kenney went, I know of the caution its risk management (lover at 80/ quietly/ wanna lie down?) requires. Kenney had the talent to turn amorous dross into haiku gold.

safe sex

saying nothing

I’ll regret

Or this:

singles bar

she tells him she always

picks losers

His trade-off—the aliveness of eros contending against the blows of rejection on the lip of the grave.

The yawning space at the right-hand margin allows the reader a long pause to take it all in, to be the participant in what has been said or left unsaid, to relate and project his or her own story. My projection was trying to imagine myself as Kenney, old and dying, but able to remain engaged and kind to the end. How to remain open while everything around you is closing down.

prognosis terminal

his favorite ice cream

melts in the cup

The courage to shake off all illusions, to display quietly the little that remains in the poet’s punctured bag.

In the background always, his gentle ironic hum.

wind advisory

I cut one more word

from a haiku

With a little luck, it will land in my pocket. The man knew what he was looking at. He could winnow the genuine from the fake without making a big fuss about either.

soft rain

the way the oncologist

says, “we.”

Bill Kenney, poet laureate of mortality.

Robert Hirschfield is a New York-based writer and poet. He has spent much of the last five years writing and assembling poems about his mother’s Alzheimer’s. In 2019, Presa Press published a volume of his poems titled, The Road to Canaan. His work has appeared in Parabola, Tricycle, Spirituality & Health, Sojourners, The Moth (Ireland), Tears in The Fence (UK), and other publications.

Two Old Poets: Portrait of A Friendship

Victoria Starr Marshall — Sun, 03 Sep 2023 23:41:18 +0000

Our friendship began when everything seemed to be ending. Shops were closed, everyone was housebound. Hospitals and cemeteries were the busiest places in town.

During COVID’s season of collective retreat, a woman I knew urged me to contact Juan Mobili, a poet who immigrated to America from Argentina in the 1970s.

“I find similarities in your poetry.” Similarities didn’t do it for me. I was too busy being gainfully alone. But when she said, “His two favorite poets are Robert Lax and William Stafford,” I relented.

Lax and Stafford were also favorite poets of mine. Lax because of his oceanic spirituality, his sense of humor, his minimalism. (Lax, like myself, wrote poetry into his 80s. Juan, at 66, is a relative youngster.) Stafford because his poems are like old growth trees—deep, solid, wise, and written in the American idiom.

A new friend in old age, when all one’s old friends have taken up underground residency, seems to come from somewhere deep in the genie’s bottle. Juan, more outgoing than I, has friends in all age groups. He works the room, as they say. I sometimes pop my head in, but the rest of my body refuses to follow.

Our introductory Zoom, in August 2020, was a little different from all the weekly Zooms to follow. There was an immediate ease between us, as if our friendship was already an established fact, and all that remained was filling in some of the historic and psychological blanks.

Juan has a strong, calm face that bends easily in the direction of ironies. A striking characteristic is the cigarette that nests unapologetically between his lips, as if this were the 1950s. He made me think of all the poets I met in Latin America when I was in my 20s and doing stories on Latin American radicals. They were mostly young. Unlike Juan, a mature family man, they could be wildly romantic about poetry, seeing it as the blood-soaked flag of revolution one moment, and a kind of literary priesthood the next.

Juan will say simply that he writes poetry, “to make the world a more hospitable place.”

His father, Jorge Enrique Mobili, was an Argentine poet of note, and a chain smoker. (My own father, Jack Hirschfield, a hotel maintenance man, was also a chain smoker. But he never a read a book in his life.)

So, despite our occupying disparate points on the aging compass, Juan and I share a common heritage of poisoned lungs. His poem, “My Father Smoking” (Adelaide Magazine, 2022), draws you deftly into the old ceremonial world of the religious smoker.

The sound when he flicked the lid open would make the whole family pause,

the sort of collective awe Argentinians experience at the movies

when Fred and Ginger danced on a terrace under a sky full of stars

My friend came of age politically during General Videla’s military dictatorship in the late 1970s.

“There was this reality going on where people would be disappearing, but you still went to buy bread and hoped someday to have a girlfriend.”

He was part of the Argentine underground and took the nickname Chacho. His closest friend, Claudio, also with the underground, took the nickname Memo. Memo was captured and thrown to his death from a helicopter. (A Bolivian friend of mine, Isaac, a mining leader, met the same ghastly end.)

In his “Letter to My Body,” in his chapbook Contraband (The Poetry Box, 2022), Juan recalls:

how you vaulted out of bed

when a car stopped suddenly at the corner;

we became so quiet then

A new friend is a mystery to be unraveled. Juan may have come from a place of darkness, but his writing is marked by careful evaluation, tender reflection, and outsider wisdom. All of this in his second language.

“In my 30s, there was a moment when I said, ‘I need to write in English because I live in English.’ Spanish didn’t seem natural to me.”

“How did it begin?” I asked him, of his journey toward becoming an extraordinary writer of poetry in the English language.

He recalls for me a day in his early 20s. He was waiting somewhere in Long Island for a haircut. He saw a store selling books and magazines.

“I bought an issue of Rolling Stone, Psychology Today and a pocket dictionary. That’s how I started to learn English.”

In due time, came these words in his new language:

I saw a stone in the shape of a resentful heart

and a question mark in the shape of a lamp

Juan moves among the mystery of things without making a big deal of the mystery or the thing. How far will language take us? It is the silent question beneath many of our questions. We find ourselves holding on to different ends of the same rope.

We don’t talk much about the rope’s fraying. Perhaps because we see it as blossoming even as it seems at times to be growing weaker.

“I still live my life with the thought that what happens next is what I am passionate about. Though I may be 66, I am also 20. I have the feeling that time will not be an issue if I keep writing. “Friendships run smoother if certain tribal illusions are maintained. I see that with you. Your vitality. Vitality and health are not the same. Vitality lives in the question, ‘How am I going to work today with images that will become something I could not even have imagined before I set them down?’”

At 84, the vitality Juan refers to is often necessary to beat back dread when images freeze in their foxholes. I’ll read him a new haiku about my father’s dying to reassure myself I can still write a new haiku:

the room

the shape

of his cancer cough

The subject of memory and poetry dots our conversations.

He is a fan of my chapbook, my only book, The Road to Canaan, about my mother’s Alzheimer’s.

“You write about a time where you have memories, but you want to see what else is there that you missed. I always say, ‘I go back to see what I missed. I don’t go back just to affirm what I remember.’”

Saturday mornings, when Juan and his cigarette appear on my Zoom, and the old porteno gives me one of his humorously emphatic greetings, I am beyond gratified that we didn’t miss each other.

Robert Hirschfield is a New York-based writer and poet. He has spent much of the last five years writing and assembling poems about his mother’s Alzheimer’s. In 2019, Presa Press published a volume of his poems titled, The Road to Canaan. His work has appeared in Parabola, Tricycle, Spirituality & Health, Sojourners, The Moth (Ireland), Tears in The Fence (UK) and other publications.

More on friendship by Robert Hirschfield:

Remembering Is What We Bring: An Old Man Recalls An Old Friend — Hirschfield recalls his friendship with Alan Solomonow, founder of the Middle East Peace Project (MEPP) “We were both young, and as children of the 60s felt it was forbidden to grow old. Now in my 80s, part of me still adheres to that ridiculous dictum. The same part that refuses to make peace with the reality that old friends die, and with them, parts of ourselves that were young.” Read more.

The post Two Old Poets: Portrait of A Friendship appeared first on 3rd Act Magazine.

Remembering Is What We Bring: An Old Man Recalls An Old Friend

Victoria Starr Marshall — Sun, 21 May 2023 20:40:22 +0000

“What brings you all here?” asked the librarian who ran the library’s Death Café.

As I gave that some thought, the woman beside me, who earlier flashed me her fellow geriatric’s smile of recognition, announced firmly, “The thinning of the ranks.”

It was like being jabbed with an electric prod. I’d experienced so much rank-thinning in recent years. My thoughts turned immediately to Alan Solomonow, the peace activist who died during COVID’s long season of dying. (Parkinson’s took him.)

We became friends in the early 80s around a notorious dispute: Israel-Palestine.

Solomonow would speak about peace and the path to peace at public gatherings. He’d respond to derision with kind smiles and hard facts. Previously an inmate at Allenwood Federal Prison, he was incarcerated for 13 months for publicly burning his draft card in protest of the Vietnam War. When I got to know him, he was roguishly involved as a back channel bringing together Jewish leaders in America with Palestinian activists in Israel and occupied territories.

During the 70s and early 80s, when many still saw the territories as bargaining chips to be exchanged for peace, liberal rabbis would flock to Solomonow like so many Nicodemuses in the night wanting to meet with Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) moderates without wanting it to be known in their communities, fearing rebuke or outright ostracism.

Solomonow, founder of the Middle East Peace Project (MEPP)— he had his fingers in any number of peace pies over the years—thought it wise for people to learn about PLO thinking from the PLO itself. I worked for him as keeper and regulator of his files that seemed to have no beginning and no end. A mystical amalgam of paper that sometimes seemed to rise up in waves from the floorboards of a crumbling lower Manhattan building, which housed the MEPP.

We were both young, and as children of the 60s felt it was forbidden to grow old. Now in my 80s, part of me still adheres to that ridiculous dictum. The same part that refuses to make peace with the reality that old friends die, and with them, parts of ourselves that were young.

“At the end of the day,” my peacemaker friend would say, visualizing the end of shed blood and shared terror, “there will be two states, Israeli and Palestinian. There is no other viable solution.” Israel’s accelerated occupation and right-wing drift has rendered that solution all but unworkable now. A disheartening prospect to Solomonow in his final years. (He was 81 when he died.)

When I raised questions about Israel’s reliance on power to set policy, Solomonow would gently reply, “But Bob, what if the necessary guarantees for peace were put in place, enforced? Couldn’t you live with that?”

That was his approach: What can you live with rather than what can you die for. A question, with modifications more relevant to me now than then: What, as an old man, with time shortening like an asthmatic’s breath, can I live for before death takes me, as it took him?

Solomonow lived for reconciliation between all people. Unable to match up to that, I spin words and do my best. In no way a devout Jew, he based his Gandhian activism on the words of the prophet Isaiah: Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. It was his equivalent of the Jesus Prayer of that nameless Russian pilgrim who made those words his life.

Sometimes, while I was sorting articles from worldwide journals (far from the ethereal pleasures of writing haiku in my old age!), the phone would ring, and the person on the other end would hang up. Solomonow would peek quickly out the window to check if there was anyone down below. Satisfied there wasn’t, he’d take a swig of whiskey from the bottle in his drawer, and get on with his day. I could never tell whether it was a gesture of self-mockery or self-congratulatory heroism.

Our relationship changed in the early 80s, when the Quakers of Northern California liberated him from his money-raising indignities on behalf of the MEPP, and put him to work as Middle East Program Coordinator of the American Friends Service Committee. We would try to meet whenever he returned to New York for visits. Talking about the conflict, there was the companionable feeling of going back in time, as the occupation didn’t change. Even the cast of characters remained more or less the same, along with their basic arguments. Did we change? I wished we had spoken more about change in ourselves than its absence in Israel-Palestine. We’d known each for so long. I knew he had colon cancer. He knew I cared for a mother with Alzheimer’s.

He spoke of leading tours of Jews and Christians to the Middle East, where they could meet and dialogue with Palestinian and Israeli peace activists. In looking for common ground for both sides to build peace on, he was, according to Quaker co-worker Wilson Riles, “attacked by people on both sides, which really hurt him.”

The peacemaker’s fate, one might say. My friend tried not to make much of it. But the subject had a way of coming up. Once a group of us were recalling the days he brought Palestinian activists to the U.S. to hold dialogues at synagogues, churches, college campuses. Among them was Raymonda Tawil, journalist and future mother-in-law of Yasser Arafat.

A colleague recalled: “Didn’t she call you ‘naïve’ in her book?” Solomonow screwed up his face and took the insult in stride.

The last time I met with him was at a Chinese restaurant in midtown Manhattan. He was beginning to suffer with Parkinson’s. I sensed it would be my last chance to ask him my unasked questions. He never spoke with me about his meetings with Arafat. What was he like, that legendary old man in his West Bank bunker with his powerful Semitic nose that seemed to punch holes into any notion of his imminent departure from the world stage.

Wrapping his arm around Solomonow’s waist, the waiter escorted him, brightly smiling in his woolen cap with its cheery pompom, to our table.

“So,” I said while we were eating, “tell me about Arafat.”

“Arafat was like a mukhtar. A village chief. He was mainly concerned with keeping his territory intact.”

That’s all he would say. Nothing about historic perspectives and legacy. Just those few words about a man safeguarding his life’s hard-earned acquisitions. In that way, little different from many ordinary men.

When dinner ended, my friend greeted a third, newly arrived older man with hugs and tears. Both peace activists had been together at Allenwood. They spoke in whispers, sayings things their ears alone could hear. I stood back, respectful of this intimacy of the few on behalf of the many.

Endings, I thought on my way home. Friends who mark and change us. Friends who put us to work, tucking away miles of newsprint for the sake of peace. Where did all that paper go?

More from Robert Hirschfield on friendship:

Two Old Poets: Portrait of A Friendship — “Our friendship began when everything seemed to be ending. Shops were closed, everyone was housebound. Hospitals and cemeteries were the busiest places in town.” Read more.

The post Remembering Is What We Bring: An Old Man Recalls An Old Friend appeared first on 3rd Act Magazine.

An Old Man, A Long-Forgotten Pitcher, An Obsession Remembered

Victoria Starr Marshall — Sat, 19 Feb 2022 20:24:32 +0000

I’ve learned to mistrust reverie. One of the unexpected lessons old age has taught me is to beware of what comes out of the soft, furry pocket of memory. Sometimes, it is a thing with edges. Like the time recently when I tried to educate my girlfriend Julia about the game of baseball back in the tame 1950s.

“I know the son of a baseball player,” she said.

“Who is the player?”

She checked with Google to make sure: “Aber.”

“Al Aber. Relief pitcher. Detroit Tigers.”

Julia gasped. You’d have thought I plucked Aber fully formed out of a hat. I actually amazed myself responding so readily, as if I saw him pitch just the other day. I hadn’t thought of Al Aber in more than 60 years.

I had to wonder if, perhaps like Cardinal’s shortstop Marty Marion, Aber was one of those players I chased from his mid-Manhattan hotel down into the Grand Central subway station for his autograph. (In the 50s, players routinely traveled up to Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds by subway.)

Julia diligently put me in touch with Aber’s son, Mick, a retired Oak Park social worker. We first exchanged emails to set up a time to talk. He sounded surprised but pleased that a stranger from the East would be interested in his father almost 30 years dead.

“In his entire career (1950-1957), my father never made more than $10,000, tops,” Mick Aber said when I phoned him. “The money a physician might make in those days. After retirement, he worked in a clothing store.”The remnants of baseball’s exalted otherness still makes that seem unimaginable. Some of my neighbors worked in clothing stores, some pitched coins. None pitched baseballs. How could a major league pitcher wind up measuring waists?

There seemed to be no reason initially to remember a journeyman relief pitcher with a lifetime record of 24 wins and 25 losses. Relief pitchers in those days were mainly anonymous commodities who often bounced around from one team to another. Before being traded to the Tigers, Aber pitched for the Cleveland Indians and wound up his career with brief stint with the Kansas City A’s.

When I understood why Al Aber was still interred in me, I thought, “Of course,” Raised in the Bronx, I was a long-suffering Red Sox fan. (At one time, there was no other kind.) Throughout my childhood, as good as the Red Sox were, the Yankees always found ways to torture the Sox into oblivion, to subject me to abject humiliation.Any pitcher from any team who worked against the Yankees had my useless blessing. I’d park myself by the visitor’s bullpen in right field, imagining every pitcher who warmed up uniformed—not in harmless flannel, but in armor only I could see. One of those was Al Aber, who it turned out, the Yankees wanted to sign out of West Tech High School, but he chose instead to play for his hometown Indians.

Even today, returning to the Bronx as an old man, whose life has been changed by deaths, disappointments, spiritual insights, it amazes me that the old dread and animosity can still be awakened. I still carry somewhere in my untended museum of childhood the heat of a young boy’s sacred fire built at the altar of a great wound.

Yankee Stadium’s right field bullpen became for me part of a mythological space where a great battle was being fought, and almost invariably, lost. At the bottom of the eighth inning of a close game, a pitcher like Aber, or fellow Tiger reliever Ray Herbert, would be called on to stop a lineup consisting of Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto, Hank Bauer and Gene Woodling, all good clutch hitters whose heartbreaking hits at the end of games would send me home with the fiendish roars of Yankee fans still in my ears.

How can it be that the embers of that old rage I felt will not completely go away when my anger at insults suffered at school can no longer even be recalled. Some days, even after the existential clarity of a Krishnamurti talk on the ills of conditioning, I may still find myself opening a newspaper to see if the Yankees lost. Does that elicit shame? Sometimes, yes. But more than shame, wonder. How can we account for what lives and what dies in us?

At one point in our conversation, I asked Mick Aber to tell me a bit about how his father fared against the greater hitters of his time.

“Mantle,” he said, “he thought he could handle. He respected him as an intimidating hitter, but he could stand up to him. He threw him a lot of fastballs and a good slider. He had success against Mantle. Ted Williams terrified him. He hit the longest home run off him my father had ever seen.”I am a Red Sox fan because of Ted Williams. I saw him hit some of the longest home runs I had ever seen. But they were never enough to dethrone the Yankees, Bronx’s evil kings of baseball.

Robert Hirschfield is a New York-based writer and poet. He has spent much of the last five years writing and assembling poems about his mother’s Alzheimer’s. In 2019, Presa Press published a volume of his poems titled, The Road To Canaan. His work has appeared in Parabola, Tricycle, Spirituality & Health, Sojourners, The Moth (Ireland), Tears In The Fence (UK) and other publications.

Alzheimer’s Remembered: A Journey in Poetry

Victoria Starr Marshall — Mon, 15 Nov 2021 17:13:02 +0000

I was 76 when I began a project I thought I’d never begin, a cycle of poems on Mom’s Alzheimer’s and my parched caregiving. Eighty-two now, I wonder sometimes if the project will ever end.

My first poem, “Alzheimer’s Psalm,” begun appropriately on a winter night, written with an excitement bracketed by question marks. How to remember the breakaway planet of forgetting that for years remained happily forgotten? Did I want to remember it? I wasn’t sure. But I felt at times it wanted to be remembered. And ultimately, it muscled my misgivings aside.

Sylvia Hirschfield was an Orthodox Jew who every Friday night would light the Sabbath candles, and turn our tiny Bronx kitchen into a room of shadows. I’d sit watching the reflected flames on the wall, stirred by the nameless yearning mystery awakens in children.

The ending of that ritual many years later, after a short season of fading, led to a set of disquieting new rituals.

When you lit the Sabbath candles that Tuesday, your elbow driving me away the river we’d both been dragging snapped and broke.

By nature trusting and gregarious, Mom disappeared into herself, hiding in silence until some stunning mental quirk would make her blurt, “So that’s what happened, David two-timed Lenny (my younger brother) with his wife and broke up their marriage.”

Mom always liked David, Lenny’s old friend. She’d feed him, dote on him, rave about him. I adjusted more easily to her memory’s vacancy than to the vacancy of the sweet soul I’d always known. Whenever she spoke of David’s treachery, a blade of ice would puncture me.

Poetry, with its wild leaps and symbolic speech, made it possible for me to revisit the fractures of my caregiving years. Her fractures and my own. One cannot touch Alzheimer’s without being touched by it. My trust in life abandoned me as surely as it abandoned her.

After publication of my Alzheimer’s chapbook, The Road to Canaan, in 2019, I wrote a poem called “Cheating At Cards”:

She slaps down her three shadows on the table and runs off with my shadow.

Recalling my mother’s frozen bewilderment when she awoke, I do not take my morning stillness and clarity for granted. Not at my age, which was precisely her age when Alzheimer’s took hold of her. At her kitchen table in Queens, where we used to discuss the state of the world, and the place of the spirit in it, I’d make her tea and set down slices of rye bread for her to slather with cottage cheese.

She’d struggle getting the cottage cheese on to the bread. (She refused to let me help.) She didn’t know what to make of the light coming through the window, or of my presence in her midst. Every new moment was a project that tied her in knots.

“It’s okay,” I’d try to comfort her. If I expected magic, I got none.

Gathering the crumbs to her, she separates one from the other like she’s been separated.

Not far from the table stood the fridge. Its spacious interior provided the scant comic relief that sanded down some of the rough spots. On a given day, I might find in the fridge a proliferation of chickens (when she was still able to take herself shopping), her bifocals, her dentures, once, even, a shoe.

If some of my Alzheimer’s poems bear surrealist markings, that fridge is the main reason. It was the final nesting place of mom’s procreative energy, the harbor of a demented creativity.

The shoe in the fridge is her left shoe. She sideswipes the celery for a clearer view.

Poetry bores a hole in time, which every day I journey through. Some days Mom is easier to find than others. Usually, I find her in the desert. Like the people of Israel in the Book of Exodus, she learned more about wandering and dryness than she ever wanted to know. Her scourged vocabulary (mine was a more articulate version of hers) contained no equivalent of a Promised Land.

When I could remember to breathe deeply, settle in beside her, hold her, graft my silence onto her, she’d periodically shake herself free from her loop of disconnect. Her face would open a bit, light would enter it. A brief visit.

After her stroke, in her hospital bed, I’d sit beside her, searching futilely for words of encouragement.

At one point, she looked up at me. On her face, the old brave smile I knew from the old days. “Life’s no fun anymore.”

She was, I had to remind myself, an inveterate fun lover. She’d savor good jokes, howl at life’s illusions, eat grapes, and sponge cakes with her sisters. They’d swap stories of their happy days as immigrants in New York’s Jewish slums when they were young, and growing into their lives as Americans, and nothing had aged yet, and perhaps never would.

Poetry, with its wild leaps and symbolic speech, made it possible for me to revisit the fractures of my caregiving years.

In The Road To Canaan, there is the poem, “Towards The Desert,” in which I imagine her disaffection with God:

She still reads his book. He’s done something to the characters. Abraham and Isaac are up to their necks in dead insects She is looking for the desert where the Jews were fed with all their different diets. She is hungry for stewed prunes, but would settle for an omelet.

I am aware of the irony in remembering Alzheimer’s through an art form that is itself a forgotten relic of generations past. But poetry is the ancient university of memory. Mom remembered Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko for remembering the wartime massacre of Jews at Babi Yar, a ravine in the Ukraine. I remember our difficult journey together. We traveled far. She didn’t know me in the end. I didn’t know myself. I look to the poems to fill in the gaps.