“well, baby, there you stand
with your little head down in your hand.
oh, my god, you can’t believe it’s happening again.
Your baby’s gone and you’re all alone
and it looks like the end
You’re back on the street
andyou’re trying to remember:
How do you start it over?
You don’t know if you can.
You dont care much for a stranger’s touch,
but you can’t hold your man.”
– “wasted time”
He was a recycled reincarnation
a puppy love
teenage delusion
someone you watched
from a safe distant
as you sat eating your dead mother’s
enormous sandwhich in the heat of day
some of the kids in school got money
to buy food at the deli
you got home made sandwiches
thick slices of brown bread
holding fat goose sausage
Eastern Europe followed you
everywhere
even here and now
long after the Nazis fled slovakia
your mother kept the memories
of the cursed regime alive
refrigerator full to the brim
with food
meat and more meat
of poor animals
you pitied in vain
as your mother made you sign
a secret pact
no vegeterian diet till the age of
eighteen
your grandmother added her clause
“Eighteen to the bridal canopy”
but you had to let that one go
it was impossible to be both a snail
hiding from society
and to marry into it..
something had to give..
You are your thick sandwiches
in silent rage
swallowing subordinate obedience
to a formidable figure of maternal terror
Your eyes focused on the pale ginger
figure of a boy in the upper class
absorbing his delicate structure
repeating his Austrian family name
as a mantra..
another Jewish refugee who clung
to science as Austria emptied itself
of jewish logical thinkers
clinging to ancient aryan rage
of irrational destruction .
I would meet both in one lifetime
summarizing the refugee prisoner
dilemma within one wretched
lifetime
He never looked up
his pale ginger eyelashes held the strong sun rays at bay
as he focused his mind on equations
ignoring the sound of my longing
drumming a loud call of primitive
tribal sounds
no proud Prussian would dare to hear
no Austrian would fall in its trap
only the ants insisted on connecting
our separate paths
carrying my sad bread crumbs trail
to an arid Mathematical desert
uniting Biology and Math
for one very solemn moment in time.
