The Book That is its Body

Steady yourself to the frog’s croak,
the swallow’s occasional splash along the surface,

the celebrated dance of the Queen Ann’s Lace.

What’s revealed?
Not that this beauty will stay its place,

but rather you were granted exclusive permission
to participate in whatever it is

that makes up this moment.
The silence flowering its birdsong.

Forget the past— it is loss, that famous abandoned house
where you collected shadows—

it is mist that tears off like the dark
into pieces the newly constituted sky swallows.

What is the day wearing?

Light garments of blue and white.
It is dressing itself in clouds, it is adorning itself in water.

It is pausing like a waxwing on a porchrail.
Be still for as long as it decides to stay.

Creak of the hinge. Woodpecker tapping on the door
of the upper stories. Forget memory: it is grief.

It is the land of mourning, it is sheets over mirrors
and long hours on hard stools—

it is like collecting rain from all day in a bamboo basket.
Quick: the swallowtail is opening pages of thin paper.

What do you read there? White-tissued wings, the book
that is its body scripts a story across the summer air.

Follow it into the flowers. Leave behind your weight—
it anchors you like a gravestone into the ground.

Where are those years? Someone you loved said
they would disappear with the snap of her fingers.

And she snapped them. And they disappeared.

—Philip Terman

The Famous Jewish-Russian Poet Termanovsky

If you found out your great grandmother was a poet,
if there was one obscure book that you discovered
one off-day at the bottom of a dusty cardboard box,

in the corner basement room, covered up by pickle jars,
slid behind your father’s moth-eaten war uniforms,
a volume slim as a small hand, the cover a fainted blue,

layered and sealed with mold, the pages tearing with each touch, the letters in Yiddish, and there’s her name: Termanovskivitch, your name, you realize, like a body suddenly twitching

for the missing limb, before it was shortened by the authorities the way they would slice off anything unpronounceable. Termanovskivitch, the famous Jewish-Russian woman poet,

her daguerreotype on the title’s facing page, her face,
the one you recognize from other portraits, but younger, a beauty, no babushka but a frilled scarf wrapped about the neck,

her dark thick hair flowing from beneath a tilted-
to-one-side beret, a few strands loose across her cheeks, translucent as porcelain, dangling from her lips a cigarette.

You turn the pages as if they were fade rose petals,
study the words, the lines and stanzas, wonder
about the pressure of her fingers pressing the pen

to the page, the blood in the hand, the composure
that would call her to sneak down a thought or a mood,
between the pogrom and the poverty, the praying

for a relative in America to sponsor her over,
the baking of the bread she had to peddle in the marketplace, having to worry over who would print and publish poems

by a woman named Termanovskivitch about being a girl
in the shtetl, the smell of challah rising,
horses and wagons in the dawn air, the mud streets,

the learned huddled toward the eastern wall, old men
in black coats, how it shamed her to have to sit
on her side of the synagogue--even if she had the space,

even if she had the time, to save her moments
in words, the way she kept buttons in a box,
and was assured of the support to write them all down.

—Philip Terman