Psalms in the Desert (for my mother)

“And he brought up Hadassah, that is, Esther, his uncle's daughter: for she had neither father nor mother, and the maid was fair and beautiful.”

Now that your eyes are gone,

your visual anchors that

brought you to safety,

living alone for twenty years or more

without the jealous husbands and lovers

bewildered by your beauty,

without the Daddies who left you

or the ones you left,

you became wise and strong,

talking out loud to God

in ironic conversations,

--”Who are you talking to, Mom?”

--”To myself! Who else?”

until the lights went out

and your photography was gone

and the books by Karen Armstrong

and all those faces, gone gone

--”Do you realize how much I love faces?”

And more than anything else,

the safety that light brings through the eyes

or at least the illusion of it

is what macular degeneration

took from you.

Your five-year-old girl

wandered door to door in Queens,

asking neighbors to be

invited in for supper

because your mother was out again

schmoozing after work,

and your sister, ten years older

who was more battered even than you,

was locked in her room again,

brooding... so you begged at doors,

and thank God, as you say,

New York was still a village.
You laugh proudly:

You knew when Mrs. Drew had

made another pot roast

and when the neighbor down the block

was frying latkas.

You knew what everyone

was having for supper.

A man appeared a few times

a year and brought you presents,

took you places, restaurants,

Broadway shows or the zoo,

and you never understood

until you were older

who this mysterious uncle was,

Martin Schaeffer,

this man who sold furs in Brooklyn,

and you asked your mother

in your crisis seventeen,

“Why did you never tell me

he was my father?”

and her answer was spit

at you in hatred,

“Because he was a Jew.”

So many questions

leftover from your childhood,

like why your mother Adelaide

and her mother Lydia Broll

spoke Yiddish in the kitchen

under their breath,

why Lydia hid in the closet

every time there was

thunder or lightning,

why these women had no love

for two beautiful daughters.

Your other Daddy was German

and a drunkard too,

but he loved you,

even if he was afraid

to show you too much,

afraid of your mother,

that foul-mouthed lush.

He worked for Ma Bell

and paid for you to take

accordion lessons,

and at six, small as you were

(and I can only imagine it

as you are still small today)

how you lugged that thing

six whole blocks to your lesson

and back again.

And then you played for him

as tears ran down his face:
“Patty,” he would say,

“play it again.”

When he was dying,

unable to breathe through the cancer,

you laid me in a crib and

took care of him.

It was a small price for me to pay,

the debt so big to your Daddy.

Your mother was late to his funeral

late from the hairdressers

and then wouldn't let you ride

in the limousine to the cemetery:

You were devastated.

Many years later, you wrote him an elegy

called “Daddy,”

and even if you gave away

the only copy you had of it,

you can still recite parts of it,

calling him “the Picasso of my

silent nights,”

the tears straining from your chest

every time you try.

How much you have given me,

the things that were

never given to you:

the books, the typewriter,

the encouragement, the cuddling,

the separation, the pain, the becoming.

We didn't have it easy, you and I,

and this long story of two women is

no less poignant than an Italian film

by Vittorio De Sica.
I will be brave in the telling of it,

I will be as courageous as David.

Thus will it rest as a testament

to your faith and your strength

like psalms in the desert.