the lovewordBetty Buchsbaum

THE LOVE WORD

THE LOVE

WORD

Betty Buchsbaum

Chicory Blue Press, Inc., Goshen, Connecticut

iv

Chicory Blue Press, Inc.Goshen, Connecticut 06756© 2004 Betty Buchsbaum. All rights reserved.Printed in the United States of America

Book Designer: Virginia AnstettCover Art: Frances Hamilton

These poems appeared or are forthcoming in the following publications: ComstockReview: “Sister on a Lawn Chair,” Emissary: “Your Other Country,” JewishLiterary Annual: “A Birthing,” Kalliope: “Kagami,” Lilith: “Listening to Myselfon My Daughter’s Message Machine,” Passager: “Plainchant,” Peregrine: “ForHer Body,” Prairie Schooner: “Winter and Storm,” Rhino: “Visit to My Mother,”Salamander: “Winter Solstice,” Sojourner: “Saying Your Names,” Solo: “TheBath,” Spoon River Review: “The Long View,”Women’s Review of Books:“Manhattan Skyscraper 1939,” “Michiko’s Plan.”

“Morning Visit” and “Why We Missed Our Flight” were published in FamilyReunion: Poems about Parenting Grown Children (Chicory Blue Press). “Listen-ing to Myself.…” was published in Her Face in the Mirror (Beacon Press).

“Winter Solstice” received the Barbara Bradley Award from the New EnglandPoetry Club. “The Bath” received first prize in the 2003 Solo Poetry Contest.

Special thanks to Sondra Zeidenstein and Ann Scowcroft for their critique ofthis manuscript; to Gail Hanlon and the Charles River Poets for helpful feedbackon individual poems; to Sara Reinstein for her close-to-the-bone sensibility.

And with gratitude to Sharon Olds for her example and for her encouragementwhich helped me return to an early love--writing poems.

First, last and always – thanks to David, my longtime, open-to-everythingpartner; and to our three beloved daughters, Helen, Susan, Marion; sons-in-lawDavid, Karl, Jeff; and grandchildren Jessica, Max, Gabriel, Eva, Katie, Raphaella,Sophia, Kyla – who so enrich my life and poems.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Buchsbaum, Betty, 1929-The love word / Betty Buchsbaum.

p. cm.ISBN 1-887344-09-81. Women – Poetry. 2. Family – Poetry. I. Title.

PS3602.U255L685 2004811'.6 – dc22

2004001145

v

for David

TABLE OF CONTENT S

The Love Word 1

ONE

Manhattan Skyscraper 5

Radar 8

For My Father, Loneliness 10

The Beautiful Song 12

Letters Home 14

TWO

My Sister’s Genius 19

In My Father’s Wallet 20

Sister on a Lawn Chair 22

Sharks and Other Predators 24

Walking on a Country Road in Winter 26

Legacy (1) 28

THREE

Plainchant 33

Visit to My Mother 35

Our Sunday Phone Call 37

For Her Body 39

Winter and Storm 41

The Bath 43

Legacy (2) 44

FOUR

Thanksgiving 49

Writing about the Living 51

Saying Your Names 52

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A Birthing 54

Morning Visit 58

A Mile from Where… 59

A Foreign Place 61

Why We Missed Our Flight 62

Lion in the Garden 64

Listening to Myself 66

FIVE

Marriage as a Car Ride in Italy 71

Expulsion from Paradise 72

The Long View 73

Pelicans at Baja 75

Dante Alighieri Woods 78

Basta 81

Girl on a Beach 83

Your Other Country 85

Waking to Music 87

Moving through Checkout 89

Alone in Marriage 91

SIX

The Hat 95

Kagami 97

Mirror 99

Corners of Fields 101

Michiko’s Plan 103

Mt. Auburn Cemetery 105

A Vision 107

Windows Open 108

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Turning Corners in Rome 110

Winter Solstice 112

In Our Garden 113

ix

THE LOVE WORD

1

THE LOVE WORD

I am reading love poemsI asked my students to writewithout using the word love.Don’t, I urged as I takepains to tell each new class,get caught in waves of I love I love,

your beloved a blur

or a trophy in your hand.

I looked hard at a plump boywho spreads this wordas lavishly in his poemsas my father spoke it in our house,spoke it with such needinessit felt more like despair.Just quietly show, I said, love’s ways.

But tonight I’ve as little heartfor my fervent crusadeagainst this loose, catch-all wordas the student who has scribbledin the margin of his poemlove was a good enough word

for Shakespeare so I guess

it’s good enough for me!

Restless, I leave my desk, passbehind you reading in a chair,lay my palms on your bald head.I love you I whisper –

a force, a wildness floats hugeand terribly quietover all I hold, cradledin my too slight, trembling hands.

2

ONE

5

MANHATTAN SKY SCRAPER

1939

The closet-like elevator in our skyscrapercreaks as it descends. I’m alone with Emilthe elevator operator, a short balding manwho has come from Germany, speakswith an accent, wears white gloves and bowshis head slightly even to me when he says hello.After he says it’s nice out or rainywe’re silent. I never know what to say.Riding the elevator, tenants rarely talkto each other or to Emil. Except for my father.If he were beside me, he might tell Emila Jack Benny joke, relive a Babe Ruth homer.I wish I could speak in his easy-as-breathing way.I never ask Emil where he lives, or whetherhe has a family, never ask him about Germanyor Hitler, born April 20th like my mother.But late at night, waking from nightmare,I look out my window at the moonlit watersof the Hudson flowing, my atlas shows, to the Atlantic –that dear, enormous ocean that can drownthose terrible men should they try, ever dare tryto snatch Jewish children asleep in their beds.

6

1942

Air raid drill – a siren splits open the night,

shrilly warns everyone in skyscrapers

go to windowless halls on middle floors.

How lucky we are to live on the 11th floor

of a 20-story building – layers above

and below like sandbags, Jews who don’t

stick out. We set out folding chairs

in our 4x10 hallway. I hope Joe DiMaggio

and his wife in the terraced penthouse

will come to our floor. I’m not a big fan,

but I’m glad the rules apply to everyone –

go to the middle. Unlike the day

of the building strike – Emil and the doorman

wearing signs outside, all of us forced

to climb stairs except Mrs. Joe who sashayed

out of the elevator in full-length red fox,

the super running it just for her.

Now, sitting in our hall packed with neighbors,

air stale and hot, walls pressing in,

I close my eyes, try to imagine bombs slicing

through upper floors, shattering lower floors,

the miraculous Middle an airborne Ark – lifting.

7

1943

White middy blouse riding up over my skirt,

books in my arms, I stand in our hallway,

11th floor of a 20-story building,

a dark, narrow space with no view of the Hudson

or of other tall buildings with windows

stacked like portholes in ships headed for the sky.

Just bare walls, a table with lamp,

two sisal door mats, for us and our neighbor.

I could be going out or coming home,

could have just called ‘wish me luck,’ closing our door,

late for school; could be fumbling for my key

as I sort out what is safe to tell about my day.

The hall is sealed like a womb, a tomb,

a holding place for my eyes, my mouth to assemble

like pieces of putty into one or another

of my faces that guard my going out

and coming in, like Janus in my book of Myths:

before I walk over the threshold to the rooms inside,

before I step into the elevator for a slow,

jerky descent to pavements gullied with light

and glimmers, down side streets, of the river.

8

RADAR

Because my mother hugged and kissedand rocked me when I was small,I didn’t feel worthless, just ashamedfor her and angry, when her lovecouldn’t save me from her scared-girl self.

Like that morning I overslept. In dreadof acid-tongued Miss Collins who yelledif you were late, I asked mother for a note.Willingly she wrote, please excusemy daughter, she had to see the dentist.

Who dreamed Miss Collins would check my alibi?The last time he’d seen me? Early July,said Dr. Holmes. Who imagined mother,caught in a tight place by Teacher,would deny she wrote it – Note? What note?

That week in detention, eyes smarting,cheeks hot as I wrote the requiredI will not lie I will not forge –

my body spun a coil of fine mesharound my spirit. Over time, that radar

so honed its pitch you’d think batshad given me lessons – it screened out allbut the few I could trust with my life.Yes, I’m grateful that its shieldhelped me make a few good choices.

9

Still, when I meet people who don’t shut the dooron those who break promises, can’t alwaysbe counted on, I listen with strange longing.Not always wise or healthy to open wideyour borders, to not strictly control passports.Yet how bold and free and generous.

10

FOR MY FATHER , LONEL INE S S

was something others got rid of for you.And once it was gone, everythingwas o-kay aay aaay

a word I made echo in an underpassin Central Park, the two of uswalking through the same passagewayI’d seen in a movie, a killer loosein the Big City, the footsteps of a victimheard entering the tunnel, then silence.But I wasn’t afraid. My hand in hislarge, moist one, I was on a catch-in-the-throat edge of being gathered in:my often sad-eyed, always running offto somewhere father, signing me upfor swim school and taking me every Tuesday –“she’s Olympic material” my camp counsellorhad told him, “a natural at nine.”Whistling, he led me west to east, pastthe lake shared by rowboats and ducks,

out of the park and up the stone stepsof the Esther Williams Talent School.Father sat inside a glass bubblewith other parents. At first I waved to him,but not after I belly-flopped dives,came in last in races – what was I doing here?

I never really liked putting my face in pool water,

wanted to do my slow, dreamy backstroke.

Shivering by hour’s end, I climbed

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from the pool, the room a dissonanceof screeches and splashes. Arms crossed,hugging my Olympic-trainee tank suit,chubby-sized, I glanced up at father.He sat so still, the others talking to each other.No hands slapped his shoulder, pointed to his daughter.No voices called to me o-kay, nice-going!

Standing there, I knew this wasn’t the daythat would close our apartness,his shirt limp with sweat, my suit dripping.

12

THE BEAUT I FUL SONG

Long before I began to think about Beauty –whether it is “Truth” (Keats)or “the beginning of terrorthat we’re still able to bear” (Rilke)or “schmaltz” (Uncle Ira)

I was chosento lead my group, the Iroquois,in the Beautiful Songat the End-of-Summer Singat Camp Oquago in the Catskills.

That night, our turn after the Mohawksto stand in a semi-circleat the center of the Rec Hall,I climbed onto a crate and facedmy tribe of eleven-year-olds –

all of us scrubbed and tuckedinto girls’ small to extra-largedrab gold shirts, hunter green shorts –initiates at the end of an eight-week riteof being at each other’s mercy.

The hall darkened, a blue spotlightnetting us in its unearthly haze.Raising my arms, I nodded –from twenty throats opened wideas unfledged birds almost in unison,

13

I drew out in flowing waltz timeO-QUAgo’s BEAU-ty E’ER will LAST.…

Swaying, leaning forward, my handscircling the air like a benediction over candlesI gathered in all our voices –

the bullies and bullied, the star athletesand last-to-be-picked,the homesick who, once home, may discoverit’s not really their homethey’ve longed for.

Up through my palms, my fingertips I liftedour off-key praise, our hungerfor a softness everlasting,song rising above the leaky rooftoward invisible stars.

14

LETTER S HOME

Camp Oquago, 1940

In an old camp photo, Evelyn Rubin bitesher lips in a back row of eleven-year-olds

who didn’t know how lucky they were

that summer to be Jewish children packed offon a train to the Catskills. Mostly we knew

to dislike rules, like writing home each day.

Except Evelyn. She’d write long letters on pinkfloral paper. Fat, clumsy, buck-toothed

bed-wetting, tongue-tied, last to be chosen

on a team Evelyn who we all agreedsmelled. Who, even on her bed, wore

like merit badges the green camp beret

and ugly gold tie we hid in our duffles.No, I wasn’t one of her bunkmates

who frenched her bed, dumped her clothes

in woods behind our cabin, but I never toldanyone to stop. And, afraid

of catching what she had, I’d pretend

she was a large empty space that at timesturned up next to me at meals

or on hikes. Now I can’t avoid seeing her

15

clothes strewn that day like garbageover the dirt, how she had to stoop,

all of us watching, to pick each shoe,

each garment up. If only she had bawled,never let up until every counselor

had run to our cabin. (Where were the grownups?)

And her parents. Why didn’t they swoopdown like Catskill eagles to rescue her?

Perhaps in her letters she re-wrote herself,

desperate to be the girl her parents wanted,“Today I won a swimming race” –

to be the girl another girl found special,

“I sleep beside Claire, my best friend.”But maybe she wrote, fifty times on a page,

“I hate this place, please take me home.”

Did the Rubins agonize over dinner,what would Evelyn do back in a hot city?

At camp she can swim, lose baby fat, learn

to get along. Did they then huddle by the radio,the latest war news? Try to grasp ugly reports

of deportations, camps, Jews who couldn’t get out.

TWO

19

MY S I S T ER ’ S GEN IU S

1942

Along the narrow corridor I head for the johnjust as my father, unshaved in pajamas,steps from his room. He is readingpages of a letter I know my older sisterhad written, then delivered to his pillowas he slept –

At dinner they had falleninto one of their discussions. He was not,certainly not, voting a 4th term for FDR.Like a lioness she defended Roosevelt’s heartand courage in standing up for the poor.Their voices spiked like fever, broke offexhausted. He retreated to the radio to getthe latest war news. She shut herselfin our bedroom, wrote furiously for hourson one of his legal pads –

In the hall he smoothsher rumpled pages of round, flowing cursive.Eyes moist, voice trembling, he calls BASHELE –her Yiddish name – to all corners of the house;murmurs to himself such a mind, brilliant!

as he passes me. I don’t need to read a lineto grasp her genius. How I envy her, wonderif one day I, too, will know how to tell a manyou’re wrong all wrong in such a wayhe not only listens

but cries out with pleasure.

20

IN MY FATHER ’ S WALLET

Forty years after you diedyou surface in a hand-tooled leather wallet,maroon with Max stamped in gold.I’m there too, folded neatlyamong brittle papers, faded snapshots.

A note from my history teacherpraises my term paper on Malaysia,says I could be “a great historian.”I wrote that paper in the library,a few dusty, secondary sourcesat my elbow. I took a line here,phrase there, made a smooth fit.If you were here, would I confess?

An onionskin copy of my essaywritten to impress Oberlin College:I want to have my finger in the pie

and build a better world.…

(Didn’t I know about cliches?)Opera is my favorite kind of music.

(Oh, was it really?) If Oberlin had turnedme down, would you have saved this?

If you were here, we might laugh gentlyat this girl, and at her father.I might show you entries from old diaries:the dance no one danced with her,her fear of failing to pass her life with honors.But more likely, still hating to see

21

your eyes grow hollow, pained,I’d smile with you at these snapshots

of your three girls – Muriel, Barbara, Betty –and say nothing of what I see –faces young, unformed enoughfor you to put all your dreams for usin an oversized wallet;and, each day, pat its bulgein your inside jacket pocketas you walk down the street, whistling.

22

S I S T ER ON A LAWN CHA IR 1952

You were waiting on a lawn chair by a fish pond.I want to say a floral blue chair to anchor it firmly

in that July day. If it floats away, I can’t get pasta spiked, iron gate locking behind me.

So I focus on that deep sling of canvas,the fish pond with carp gleaming orange and yellow,

a wide, tidy lawn sweeping down to the sea.They fit my relief as I walked towards you,

though after we hugged, I was afraid. Mouthtwitching, you stared into my eyes,

the only mirror, you said, they allowed you to see.Running a hand through your cropped hair,

once long and blonde, you spoke quickly as ifwe had little time, quietly as if someone

might overhear. It was like dying, you told me,when they turned on the current. You fought

the nurses, so they put you in a strait-jacket in a wingwith women who didn’t know their names.

There, a beautiful young girl who thought she was a doghowled through the night. After you let them

wire you to the machine, they moved you to a cottagewhere patients were allowed combs. Eyes narrowing,

you told me it’s like a boardgame: say and dowhat they want and you’ll advance all the way

23

to the house with geraniums in the windowbox.Only then will you go home. Sitting on the grass

by your chair, I caught no hint in your voice that I,five years younger, could do more than listen.

I looked out at the boats on the water, the smalltriangle sails like ears trying to stay afloat.

I remembered how you’d whisper across our beds at nighttroubles at school, names of secret crushes;

how you’d get furious with mother when she failedto stick up for me against an unfair teacher.

I dug my sharp heels into the manicured grass, certainI heard a beautiful young girl bark in terror.

I wanted to get out of there, the way I’ve escaped a bad dreamby saying you’re in control, just open your eyes!

But it was no dream I left behind, the iron gatethat let me out clanging shut on you.

24

SHARK S AND OTHER PREDATORS

The way a shark attacked a manin knee-deep water on Cape Cod Bay,bit his foot, grabbed his leg, pulled him backwardsout to sea – that’s how my sistercan be menaced. She and I can paddle around,easy talk on a hot day, until some actorwe mention, his bulging eyes, reminds herof her doctor: he’s tampered with her x-ray,wants her under his knife; plotswith a lawyer, a rabbi to get rid of her.Seized by a shark, that man on the Capepunched his attacker in the eyes the faceuntil it let go, swam away. But wheredo I aim? – invisible teeth pulling her out,pulling me with her.…

I let go my hold,say I can’t go round and round with you,

flinging words at enemies who reproduce

like flies. Let go – and hold my breath.Once, after telling this sister who had soothedmy hurts when I was small, you need help

and I can’t give it, she yelled into the phone,you want me dead, then slammed it down.This time, that wildness behind her eyesfades. She speaks again of old movies,The Scarlet Pimpernel, how we clungto each other in the scary parts, chantedacross our beds at night Is he in heaven

or is he in hell, that damned elusive pimpernel?

That man who named the shark displayed

25

his 40 stitches so skeptics would believe it wasa shark, not a blue, come so close to shore.I wish my sister could name, as plainly,what preys on her. How else will she knowit is never me.

26

WALK ING A COUNTRY ROAD LATE

WINTER

Is it yelping or honking explodingin the woods beyond that house and field?Frightened, I want to think honking,a flock of geese by a pond at nightfall,but I’m afraid it is yelping,a pack of wild dogs after rabbit or fox.Close enough, maybe, to charge across the stubble,eyes points of steel, teeth bared.

But no, that outcry is deep in the woods.By this wide field I’m safe –if safe means to stand at an outer edgeof danger and smell feral breathgain on another’s neck.I think of my sister, the dark terrainher mind so often is trapped in,enemies nipping at her heels.How unsafe to be in her skin.Yet how shaky to be the one spared.As if I have no right to standon this road, my weight releasing downinto my feet, received by firm ground.

Rising like brush fire an eruption –rhythmic honking, not yelping,hundreds of geese taking offthroats opened wide, long necks angled forwarda precise, V formation

27

of harsh, sad cries urging each other onoh on go on

On their updraft I’m lifted,delivered from thinking.

28

LEGACY (1 )

I can’t put toothbrushes in a poem, I really can’t.

Sylvia Plath, BBC Broadcast

The toothbrush I remember is a pycopaynatural bristle, extra-firm, the kind

my father favored. Some mornings he’d invite meto inspect his aging teeth. Lips stretched

to show me that even his molars were white,he said if I put an earnest hand to it,

five minutes, downward strokes

I too could keep a gleaming mouth.

I’d stare at his enamel, grey and mottled,murmur yes and look away.

It scared me, how he fooled himselfthat he’d gotten rid of the stained and ugly.

And expected as much from me.Tonight my own teeth clearly look yellow,

pollinated by the quart of popcornI downed in the movie theater

keeping up with the man on screen who goesto Las Vegas to drink himself to death,

29

a last binge with no clear reasonand that no act of love by his loyal

girl friend can slow much less stop.I came home sad and angry – hating

as my father did, the will to do nothingto respect your one and only body.

Furiously, I brush my teeth, rinse awaythe yellow powder. But I can’t deny

my teeth have turned dingy, at best off-off-cream.Midnight, still edgy, I fix a sandwich,

sit on my meditation pillow and chew.Eyes half-closed, I sink into the rhythm,

steady almost courtly, of my aging uppersand lowers. And listen to what they still can do –

break bread, gently mash, slow dance apartand touch again.

ISBN 1-887344-09-8

“How true is love in art?” asks Betty Buchsbaum in one of her manyfinely tuned, self-questioning poems, confessing a worry about “parsingit to death.” But like a nuanced lexicon of love, this impressive first col-lection offers a richly various, deeply moving account of the many mean-ings that cluster around “the love word” as, in all its radiance, it encom-passes desire, joy, grief, and reconciliation. – SANDRA M. GILBERT

Buchsbaum tells us what it was like to be a young Jewish girl in Manhat-tan in 1939, standing at “an outer edge of danger”; she shares with usthe pleasures, the small human aggravations and necessary spaces in along marriage; she celebrates the easy and forgiving joy of mature loveand sexuality; and, in some of the collection’s most moving poems, shespeaks of the passionate love of parent for child, of child for parent. –CORTNEY DAVIS

Betty Buchsbaum’s poems are what we strive for, hope for, in art: evi-dence of a lived life. At once intimate and historical, passionate andcompassionate, they both remember and envision the arc of a woman’slife and, in doing so, reveal the strangeness and intimacy of our relationswith each other. These are poems unafraid of beauty, whether it takesthe form of Keats’s “Truth,” Rilke’s “beginning of terror,” or Uncle Ira’s“schmaltz.” Reading them, we feel in our hearts what the body feels inBuchsbaum’s “Winter Solstice”: “this limit to darkness/ and promisedtilt towards light.” – ANGIE ESTES

“How true is love in art?” As we read these tender and ironic songs of thevicissitudes of marriage, family gatherings and arguments, lasting friend-ships and painful losses, young children and children grown, we can onlyanswer that The Love Word is as true as it gets. – DEBORAH DENICOLA

From 1940’s Manhattan to timeless Italy, from girlhood to motherhoodto grandmotherhood, and through “the free fall way” of long marriage,these poems, with unflinching sight and unfailing generosity, do some-thing few poems can: they teach us how to live. – ROBIN BEHN

Betty Buchsbaum, who wrote poems when she was young, stopped toraise a family, earn her Ph.D. in Literature from Brandeis, write essaysand scholarly articles, teach at Massachusetts College of Art and thenbecome its Dean and Academic Vice-President. The Love Word is herfirst collection. She lives in Newton, Massachusetts.

$18.00