42 KATZENELSON STREET

1.
A mellow tune reminds me of my father
at the end of the Sixties, when I’d just been born, injected
with a triple vaccination: his curiosity, his fears,
his love. A handsome guy in black patent shoes,
a mustache, a shadow of one, and all that mellow
music like an artery in my growing body, an ochre housing project,
a paved sidewalk, my mother sails my stroller into the white morning.
An expanse of homes, the Sixties run freely.
This lightness in the air.

2.
Lightness? Perhaps. What do I really know?
My memory like a filter, my parents don’t talk,
I hardly ever ask. We’ve gotten used to the brittleness
of shame. Not shaking the dust from the flowers. Not disturbing  
the cracked glass in the cabinet. 
Can I look through their eyes, immigrant family,
a European clan settled in the blaze of Israeli summer,
where did they look through the decades, the Six Day War,
the War of Attrition, black Yom Kippur nights:
the firstborn six years old. Then the girl born without breath.

3.
Where’s Dad? Mother is a warm body nearby during siren nights.
A large dark blanket covers the windows.
Sister,
for nine months you held on, patient, in the womb
until you burst like a soap bubble into nothingness.
Look at me remembering. Lost
tenderness, my sister, the finest shadow
stuck to our bodies like netting.
The crocodile of war crawled up to your navel          
and consumed everything. Leaving behind empty lines:
your life.

4.
In grade school we raised silk caterpillars
in shoeboxes lined with mulberry leaves
and bet whose would be the first
to bloom fragile pupae, damp, gray wings          
emerging from a thicket of silken down.

In the end the butterflies broke through, rose up from the skin,
their soft bodies stuck to the shoe boxes like decorations on a lace tablecloth.
They trembled a bit. Froze. Died. Turned to dust.

42 KATZENELSON STREET