Charming Gardeners by David Biespiel

Author:David Biespiel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2013-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

TO SMITH FROM NORTHAMPTON

— Massachusetts

Dear Jeff —

God knows why the Jews of the twentieth century

Put their Yiddish Book Center in the center of Jonathan Edwards’

Protestant Western Mass. Luke and I found it

on St. Joseph’s Day

On the way to Emily Dickinson’s (closed for the season).

So: From outside her windows, again,

I imagined a small hand

Writing the words spider and light, despair and heft.

And that was about all I got from the place.

Plus the exceptional hedges.

— Jeff, it’s late winter, hard rain, harder wind,

And the Oxbow River flooded

Above the trunks of trees,

The Oxbow grumbling at spring.

In Western Mass., about half an hour from Giff’s house on Harlow Street,

The wind is never a gift, and the children, therefore,

are dropping

Their store-bought flowers and turning away

From the Oh, Come On! Spring Festival.

Just outside of town, driving now for hours in and out of rain

And the threat of rain,

I suck on my little ditch of afterthoughts —

They straggle without hubbub.

Who’s a victor in this part of the world, I want to ask?

What with the narrow roads and clapboard houses

And dainty-apron’d matrons —

And the roads all ruddy and far from the honky-tonks

I grew up around in Harris County, Texas,

Where the women are divided by height and class,

And the men grow as quiet as stars.

And, strange as it may be,

That’s when I think of the last Western sandwich

I ate in one of those greasy spoons on NASA Road 1,

Three and a half decades ago.

I can still taste the melted butter burnt in the skillet!

And the minced onions

And the eggs and the chopped ham,

Dash of pepper, slices of toast

that were so thin

They tasted like quiet disbelief.

The eggs so soft and well-fried, Jeff!

It was like the pleasure of God keeping me out of hell.

I remember, too,

A wren, suddenly, in the threshold of the diner’s door —

It was a cactus wren,

a healer, solitary.

You’d think no one would turn against it in that back-road diner

With its feed bag décor.

But that wren tried to tear through a window,

And the glass and the bird lay at our feet —

I want to say it was like a prattle of empty-handed fears

But it just lay there.

And all the gentleman’s gentlemen of the joint

Did absolutely nothing.

One dude, near whose feet

the wren had died,

Spied at me like a cobra.

In the moment of understanding between us,

I knew my life was not worth hocking to get worked up about it.

That was then. That was Texas.

In Western Mass.,

In the season of Lent with the rivers flooded,

Days before your son’s to be born

into the unpaged century,

I begin to remember, as if in a dream,

A hundred Yiddish sayings good for a boy like yours:

A man cannot jump over his own shadow.

A dog without teeth will also attack a bone.

A bad peace is better than a good war.

If you don’t want to do something, one excuse is as good as another.

A man comes from dust and in the dust he will end —

And in the meantime it is good to sip a little gin.

The names of sons, Jeff, are like the number of days.

True, the

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