I Do This, I Do That

The Jewish New Year and my birthday converged in one week;
I was 5,718 years younger than the world!
The day before was startlingly beautiful
as though summer had never sweltered, as though rains had never
persisted. My cousin and I chatted on the plaza of the library
until she left to register voters, and my friends collected me
so we could walk to the gardens two blocks away. After they left
I went back to the library for some books and then back
to the gardens to read them, but as I walked
my daughter called me from Mexico City
so I chatted with her while wandering in the native woods section
and all of this would have been enough good fortune for the year
but I returned to the library to wait for my husband
and as I was reading a new anthology I came upon a poem
by the Alaskan poet who my friend Danny had filmed
and I remember Danny and I watching his film and then imitating
the little click in the poet’s pauses—
we could laugh ten times in a day just repeating them
from the last three lines of a particular poem—
we laughed in Anchorage, in Talkeetna, in Kotzebue
and as I read down the page I came to the poem’s last lines
and found—of all the poet’s poems, of all the anthologies—
they were those very lines from that one poem
The voice of the snowman / calls the white- / haired children home
the poet and my friend, both gone, and the poem
a surprise visitation in the reading room
and then my husband arrived and we drove to Brighton Beach
to the enormous supermarket with its mile-long steam table
of Slavic delights, and even though we were in a hypnotic daze
circling the table in surprise at the magenta and orange combinations—
and those my favorite colors!—eventually, after much discussion
we made our choices and placed the containers
in what must have been someone else’s basket, but still came home
with more than enough from our own, and that’s how it began—
with such weather, family, friends, gardens, poetry, colors, the living and dead, plenty from the whole continent (plus Asia), and even the ocean
called on from the beginning for creation.

Read more from Issue 22.2.