fall on someone—who might be drinking
a glass of water, reading a book, or
pondering last night’s dream. Then not—
while back home in the gene pool,
I’m lounging with the New York Times
reading about two thousand pound bombs.
I stand with Israel, so many neighbors say.
How I felt that first time at services
seeing my mother’s bones in strangers:
twisted microscopic threads, nothing to do
with love, but there they were: my
grandmother’s sad eyes, my father’s scowl.
So many neighbors stand with Israel. I claim
the candlesticks my grandparents brought,
the curly hair and almond eyes, the way
we argue, doubt, the way we try. And Ruth:
the way she loved her mother-in-law,
followed her to alien fields and splashed
her own genes into the pool. My silly
chromosomes. I drowned them in the man
I married too. Drowned bodies rise,
I know: those chromosomes could bury me
someday. But stand? On what, with no ground
anywhere, only layers of sorrow and loss?
I lie with the dead—all the dead—
their rubble and their thirst.
Ruth Hoberman is a writer living in Newtonville, Massachusetts. Since her 2015 retirement from Eastern Illinois University, she has published poems in such journals as (most recently) Salamander, RHINO, SWWIM Every Day, Ibbetson Street, and Connecticut River Review.
