WORLD ON A STRING, 2012
—for Erna Rosenberg
Thunder, and my cats, pure products of America,
go crazy at the kitchen door,
trapped, the day—which is everything—
promising nothing for them but my departure,
dry kibble in a bowl,
then me alone in the car singing with Sinatra,
I’ve got the world on a string,
through splotching rain driving, I’ve got a song that I sing,
a hundred miles to a wedding,
and singing Every time we say goodbye,
thinking of you waking yesterday how strange the change
in your body of ghost bones,
from major to minor, from what you’d hoped would be
your last sleep, disgusted,
grousing,” Oh no! am I still here?”
How strange the change from major to minor….
Today, I’m getting away to dunes and bay,
my old songs for company—
Every time we say goodbye, I die a little—
toward a ceremony of I do’s, champagne in a museum
gallery, wild rain syncopating the roof
and suddenly everything aglow, lit by sun
and some of us will leap
from our gilded chairs to gape at a double rainbow,
a vision at the window phenomenal, fugitive—
like you, also vanishing—
and in this moment I feel sure you must have died,
and I think of your befuddled friend last week
wanting to reassure you,
saying, But Erna, God’s in all of us, you know,
and you, my devout atheist, my beloved aunt,
exploding, in panic,
protesting, Then, get him the hell out of me!
The poor woman must have been terrified,
but I could only laugh,
when, still furious on the phone, you told me
your revulsion at her idea of your ghost-bed conversion.
What we used to say proudly about you,
decades after the Joe McCarthy 50’s almost broke you,
She kept the faith…. Now, at this window, I remember
your radiant photograph
in last year’s Globe: CENTENARIAN PROTESTS WAR,
your snowy Thursdays demonstrating with the Zinns—
no good protest
you couldn’t summon exultant diehard support for—
no bullshit you wouldn’t passionately excoriate—
yet no song you couldn’t sing….
Here at the wedding with people I hardly know,
I marvel at the two rainbows, their radiant curves
fugitive, evanescing,
a confluence of nature and enchantment—phenomenon
the half-lit gathering takes for a great romantic omen—
then, like the brave arc of your life,
my Erna, my heroine, my exemplar, utterly gone.
