Tesseract: A Parent’s Guide to Time Travel
(with thanks to Madeleine L’Engle) A tesseract, you may recall, acts like a wrinkle in time Cinching together now and long ago or Right this minute and decades hence Like a pleat, a hem Or a cloth swept from the table All whorls and fluting, rapidly compressed. It’s what they nowadays would call a wormhole And say you need a warp drive to approach. But parents generate them just by being: Seed them with our breath Spark them with our glance Roil spacetime’s fabric with our every step. You know it from yourself: How the smell of chlorine can transport you To those mornings...
Read MoreThe Frozen Alster
Hamburg wraps itself around two lakes Formed by the river Alster. Once in a very rare winter they freeze solid Conjuring new space in the center of town. A sudden shortcut in the sunshine A huge white loop to skate or ski A nighttime fairground where you go to drink hot gluehwein Bought from lantern-lit booths suspended over water. To eat sweet powdered pastries and hear accordions play To watch the crowds of people laughing On a street that’s made of waves. It’s something to see but I never saw it Twenty years ago, at twenty-three. My bus stopped right around the corner at the...
Read MoreRosary
Hail Mary Full of grace Blessed are you among women And blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus The baby had colic and money was tight She was not always patient. Sometimes at night she wept Watching his finally-sleeping face Stroking the tiny foot that would one day be a man’s Fearing what hurt she’d done him in her pain Holy Mary Mother of God Pray for us sinners Now and at the hour of our death You get the child you get, not the one you’re ready for When his passion overwhelms him She tries to keep him safe But she can’t understand the things he sees Sometimes...
Read MoreKaddish for Mr. Rosenbaum
Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba I am Rivka, a convert, bat Avraham ve Sarah also daughter of Heidi, whose first memories are of craters made by English bombs in Hamburg streets granddaughter of Lotte, who died in Marburg the day the Wall came down adopted niece of Hilde, Lotte’s childhood friend who decades later became my own. b’alma di v’ra khir’utei, v’yamlikh malkhutei Lotte, my Oma, came to New York every summer Bringing strange toothpaste and lotion and chocolates I loved Speaking to my mother a language I didn’t understand And telling me stories, always the same...
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