Gold Street Bakery in AlwaysWinter, Poland

Established nineteen-forty-five,
the storefront sign proclaims in gold.
What pastry chefs were still alive

by then? Few Jewish ones survived
to roll pale sheets of dough, unmold
plum cakes. By nineteen-forty-five,

most towns were Judenrein. They thrived
without their Jews. And truth be told,
what Jewish bakers still alive

after the War wished to revive
dead trades? Their ovens stayed bone-cold.
No marzipan in forty-five

or candied lemon peel. No knives.
No flourwhite fingers to fold
the pastry, blossom-shaped. Alive,

they saw their recipes archived,
the sugared artifacts of old
Polska, burned up in forty-five.
What Jews? What Jews were still alive?

Zeno's Paradox of the Shtetl

It is the frozen world that I’ve approached
for thirty years but cannot reach—

halfway
to Poland in a sleigh,

imagining the silver runners sled across
the permafrost,

and halfway to Galicia again,
passing the wooden synagogues, the men

who wear black coats and fur-trimmed hats,
their wives and daughters fat

with goosedown layers,
mittens, scarves, babushkas covering black hair,

the women’s faces lined, opaque,
a pewter sheet of ice above a lake,

and halfway to a town that shivers by
the Vistula, the river’s luminosity

like fish scales scraped
away with knives, then halfway following the liquid shape

which water makes through land,
always the distances expanding,

a home so faraway it can’t be seized,
intangible as winter through the trees.

Shomer

The night that Bubbie died I hadn’t planned
to watch beside her bed, holding her hand

while skin began to lose the tint of skin,
the rose perfume she wore becoming thin

as scent, though more than memory. Some say
a spirit passes from the world the way

it came, closed tightly against dew. After
I draped the mirror black, I tried to graft

the midnight integers that laced her arm
onto my own, a death camp’s good-luck charm

she carried sixty years. Tradition says
the dead need privacy—we cannot gaze

at those who can’t gaze back. But I
stared at the iris fading in her eye.

We’re flowers, all of us, even the ones
who plant gray pebbles on the marking stone,

instead of praying with bouquets. We cleave
to life with finger-roots yet cannot leave

the dead alone. They branch through us until
each body finds the body of the soil.