Fridays we crossed the George Washington Bridge
to sit at her table.
Each time, she said, as if sure
he would forget, “Sol, what about the boy?
Give the boy his wine . . .”
Here she is:
my mother’s mother,
propped on the metal frame she pushes this way, through the grass.
On the bench, my grandfather sits behind an open NY Times—
my grandmother speaks for him.
Not even certain whom she speaks to,
she nonetheless says,
“Sol was wondering
When you’ll get a haircut . . .”
She is at her ease, now, outdoors, in her wheelchair,
the attendant beside her: at times
rising from her seat, as if to instruct or to remember—
the two of them chatting like dear friends.
Most of the trees are still bare.
The two women have coats on.
From the window, heat comes off
the stove coils.
At the far end of the yard
the dark pines sway.
Festival Of Spring
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Dear Benjamin,
Truly, was not our teacher, Allen Grossman right?
The most important work of poetry, to channel his phraseology, is to bring to mind the image of persons.
Once, Benjamin, you revealed to me the force of a word–PROXY.
Your poems after, say, 1997 revolve around the whole idea of speaking for the Other; speaking for those charged to speak for others; and speaking to evoke the lost other in his or her absence.
In this poem, set against the very old pastoral backdrop of spring–and a late spring too, and a chilly one; chilly enough for coats!–you illuminate the presence of your grandmother while she is in the midst of illuminating the presence of her other, Sol.
Sol is a figure, a part for a whole, a newspaper so telling of a certain kind of urban cultural milieu.
What does it mean for the grandmother to speak for him and by extension and then for the poet, the grandson, to enfigure them all? It means that spring is here in the awakening of realities that can only be expressed like this.
The plural subjective reference–we–takes us into the journey. I become a part of the family who witnesses a diminishing landscape of genealogy. I become the child who accompanies his mother on a visit into the very heart of family.
Quietly, then, you evoke the deliciousness of being an outsider for the two women: two generations talk in ways that perhaps only the elements can understand.
This is a beautiful poem and it stands among the many that you have written recently and that deserve to be collected now into a whole.
~
…Proxy, memory, an ethos illuminated and remembered…
…Countless visits and quests into the real heart of family, both biological and of the other heart, meaning friends: Frankie Newton and otherwise…
Love,
Jonathan