Jehanne Dubrow

Fragment from a Nonexistent Yiddish Poet

Ida Lewin (1906-1938)

Always Winter, Poland

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30.


Tonight....I am remembering
my baby’s feet,.........each toe
.........a pink pink currant,
her soles soft dough, clean
from never having known
the world of dirt.
Tell me, should I wish
my child preserved in a bottle,
forever sweetened there,
............her tiny thumb held
like a stopper to the mouth?
......or should a mother dream
of rot, instead?....an airtight jar
may mean the opposite of death,
.........summer berries kept
always fresh, fruit poised
behind the glass but never picked

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31.


..........Some claimed
the farmer made his soil bleed,
poured pomegranate juice
among the seeds. A stone
flashed liquid red like blood
on clay.
Some claimed the ground
was a woman’s wound
now draining clean of birth
and afterbirth and even
the dried-up memory
of pain
.............................................[translation one]

The farmer bled his field, split
earth apart like the skin
of a pomegranate. Red stones
unpeeled themselves from dirt,
rubies where only rocks
should grow.
Is this the landscape healing
from a wound?
..................—A woman
trying to forget the birth
she never wanted,
the burden she pushed
and pushed away,
like a piece of fruit
and her without
an appetite.
.............................................[translation two]

The field was furrowed like the space
between a woman’s legs. It bled
so that the fallow birthed
the purity of dirt
.........and undiscovered stones—
a resting place for seeds
and rubies made to taste
like fruit.
.............................................[translation three]

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33.


I’ve heard it said
embalming loss
is what the goyim do,
............each grief
soaked in formaldehyde,
like jars of bone
to hold up to the light.
They build a shrine
and call it memory.
....choose life,
the Torah warns,
because the choice
..........(swift
as walking through
a darkened passageway)
divides. us from
the steady cold of earth.
We lock our dead
in pine,. let buried ones
stay buried.

**

39.


After a sock is darned
dark thread remains to scar
the heel.........forever
raised as a new wound.
With every step, a foot
recalls the tearing of the wool.
.........memory inhabits
the slipstitch and the knot,
no matter how skilled
the seamstress, her fingers
made for repairing the grief
in a torn black shirt,
or the pants split apart
like a fissured pair of souls.

**

return to sawbuck 3.1

**
Jehanne Dubrow’s work has appeared in Poetry, The Hudson Review, The New England Review, Shenandoah, Barrow Street, and Gulf Coast. She is the author of a poetry collection, The Hardship Post (Three Candles Press, 2008) and a chapbook, The Promised Bride (Finishing Line Press, 2007). Her second collection, Stateside, will be published by Northwestern University Press in 2010.