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He returns again, remembering Cossacks as sweaty as their horses
from chasing down kikes. The congregation trembles in the synagogue,
shielding the torah and sealing their door against the small
orphaned son of Minsk who weeps outside it. In 1908, he is keeper
of the pistol for his Anarchist cell. In 1909, he leaves for
Detroit, where you can spit on a rabbi in the street. But he sails
home to master carpentry, and in the smell of glue and planed
pine he measures angles that will stay true. Then he goes back, but now
to Brooklyn, where in 1911 he may not build. He pushes mortar barrows
on building sites for bricklayers who can spit on any Jew in
any American street. He arrives with Dora. Marriage, he tells
her, is a bourgeois convention to which they will not yield. She
recruits their sons as communists. She teaches the daughters to cook.
She dies, and he writes long, sorrowing, unexpected poems in
a lumpy stew of Yiddish, Russian, and the Hebrew he'd renounced
before his travels began. He smears his bedclothes with the bright
blue Waterman's ink his grandchildren use for their school work.
His trigger finger is dyed, and his lips, as he goes back again.
In the poems, he calls her his wife.

Frederick Busch
Five Points
Volume 9, Number 1

Copyright © 2005 by Five Points,
Georgia State University.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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