Together in a Sudden Strangeness by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

GAIL MAZUR

Matzoh

As if to mock me in my widowhood

as if to deny my pandemic isolation

this huge carton arrives at my door,

an absurd cosmic mistake from Yehuda

Matzos: ten boxes, which should last

long enough to get incinerated

with me at the old New England

cemetery that was once the family

farm of poet Robert Creeley’s great-

grandfather, and where his descen-

dants can be buried together ad aeternum.

Mirabile dictu, that Bob and the ashes

of my beloved—and mine—will lie in

that pastoral landscape where I like to

walk on spring mornings. One of the first

arboreal cemeteries, a sanctuary, really,

for mourners, bird-watchers, and my friends

the Sunday botanizers. Should I be buried—

or should my ashes just be sprinkled about

with old dry crumbs of Yehuda’s uncalled-

for unrisen bread? Such questions never

occurred in what today we call “normal times”

when I’d bring cut flowers to lay on our stone

etched with a palette, a brush, a pen, nestled

alongside the markers of other Jews,

and Chinese and Armenians, near Malamud

and Achilles Fang and Izzy Stone, far

from Longfellow and Mary Baker Eddy,

overlooking a pond which is serene home

all summer to a picturesque pair of

weeping willows and two white swans.

Who was the misinformed deliverer of

such excess to my door, of these symbols

of my people’s eternal hardships? O

Yehuda Matzos, Yehuda Matzos, yes,

in your crisp hard plenitude you mock

and (kind of) amuse me, when I’d for-

gotten how you’ve always been baked

with the salty tears of my people’s exodus—

but oh, I will eat, and eat alone, until the day

I can eat no more of our unleavened bread.

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