GENEALOGY

My children ask why I spend so much time with the dead.

I hunch over the microfilm reader,

squinting at squiggles of faded script

in a language I don't know,

never did.

It's as if someone is speaking in tongues! My back feels

as if I've been holding the world up.

My eyes are falling out, just as eyes do

in old Jewish curses.

I've been tracking a trail that's already cold.

But today I learned one grandmother came from Vishniets.

My grandfather saw her in Vishniets

at the village store where he worked--

a pigtailed girl who wanted a scoop of flour.

From the brink of the deep

black well in her eyes, he fell in

love with her then.

Now, with her,

I plod the unpaved streets of Vishniets,

appraising this world with her eyes--

the wooden houses where people eat cabbage and kasha,

make bread from black flour, where milk flows

out of narrow-necked earthenware bottles.

At the end of the town, a thicket

where branches grow close, touching,

pale blue forget-me-nots spring from the ground.

Across fields, early cherries

are tingeing the edge of the sky

with the blush of orchards. Tossing my

long black pigtails just like hers,

swishing my skirts the way she used to,

I walk in my grandmother's dust, follow her footsteps.

Ice has formed on a pond by a mill in Vishniets.

I hear it cracking.

It melts, streams down my face.

I am as close to love as anyone comes.

These are the losses I never totaled.

I am regaining them now. I clasp them to me,

unclench my teeth, whisper Mine. Mine.

The Jewish community of Vishniets (now Vishnevets, Ukraine) was totally annihilated in the Holocaust.