LINES

A tad late :) But here's a poem for Parashat Toledot

Days have been foggy, a fog so thick it blurs the rays from the street lamps

When the desert temperature drops during the night, sometimes

I smell bonfire, or is it the smell of coal

like in Berlin winter nights many years ago

Yet how west coast it felt, to sit around a fire pit

in fleece and flip-flops

guitar, burgundy leaves and evergreens

sturdy trees bent halfway, resisting, yielding

to the Pacific wind

Maybe I knew then I wanted to live here one day

although New York still tries to claim it is my home

Another foggy morning

oil pumps slowly bending, rising in the swamps

and the magnolias in bloom, again

A friend, who moved from New York to Australia

is moving to LA next year

Who would have thought we’d live in the same place again

Each morning this week, as I drove north

the fog lifted around the last curve before the exit

I wonder how many times in your life

you’ve taken this same curve and exit

seen these hills and scrubs

I still write poems to you, or rather

fragments

lines

or maybe they are messages to nobody and everyone

When I drove back home from the hospital today

I drove by the house where you once lived

It’s boarded up now, I wonder

which city tears down and rebuilds more readily

New York or LA?

On the east side one evening I wanted to find

the place where a friend who died once lived

I remembered a ramp, an underpass, a steep street, then left

or maybe right

past a low, white public building

palm trees outside his kitchen window

I didn’t know the address

It might have been in Angelino Heights

not Echo Park

In Hebrew angel means messenger and it does in English, too

City of Messengers

lonely city, empty city

at night, the freeway free

like in a Bruce Springsteen song

I wonder if LA wants to be loved or is unfazed

by the thought that it can disappear, like that

leaving but tar and swamps and desert wind

echoing from the hills

Have you noticed that there is no wind on foggy days?

In brisk sunshine, it is relentless

When I drove back home from the hospital today

I thought of the woman I had visited

whether she might read this week’s portion I showed her in the Bible

Toledot, These are the lines of Isaac

I liked the woman’s turquoise ring, from Santa Fe

where she went once with her husband, a jeweller

I want to go home to my garden, she said

I thought of the parents who lost their child

who I met in what for them is now the life before

I could not picture them in their grief

I just saw their smiles

I thought of the Mexican woman in the sauna

telling her friend that every day, she cries, Lloro, lloro, todos los días

but con 20 dólares in her pocket, ay

she feels as if she owns the world

It’s been a long time since I sauntered along a peach-bowl highway

with twenty dollars in my pocket

balancing along the curb, singing It’s only a Paper Moon

I still confuse the Aramaic words for here and now

Last night I drove through a glen and up the hills

the palm trees were majestic

the rabbis knew that thoroughfares separate domains

yet the fog was as thick as everywhere

I turned the heating on

I could see the cone of light

It felt like riding in my father’s car through the forest in a winter night