Track Mangoes

Listen to Jens read Hartford Jew: click here.



Hartford Jew

I remember you, Harford Jew,
And your friends also,
A tight circle of curly haired heads,
Tittering at my lip then swollen
To the size of a tangerine.
I stand at your bedside now,
Touching your skin,
Loose and cold and wet,
Like the thin slimy fin of a gefilte fish.
I don’t utter in the room, breath
Or even sneeze. Achoo.
I mouth farewells.
Hartford Jew, do you remember when
We practiced the violin together?
I quit it for Jazz.
Harford Jew, do you remember when
You took year of Hebrew
And I studied the Germanic tongue.
You used to hate it when we were young.
Gornisht gornisht, you used to say, kicking.
I still remember the taste of the shoe
In the mouth, the boot on the face,
My shirt’s buttons coming undone,
And the children chanting Nazi scum.
I said rumors were untrue,
That you treated speech with an unjust fist,
That the words themselves were
Soft and supple, a cotton ball,
Not the ich bin du you knew at all,
But something delicate and small.
Hartford Jew, children can be so cruel sometimes,
And loving, and fun, and mysterious too,
But only when they speak clearly, and
Clearly your language was silent to me—
A machine with a gear and a spoke.
Bei mir bist du shayn. How obscene.
But then, the words always
got in the way? Didn’t they?
Oh Shit became Auschwitz, and
Kvell was hell and a schmuck
Was something into which you stepped.
You said there was a loch in my kop.
I called you my mazeltov man.
Oh you.
Oh my tangled tongue, tied everyday
Like a cat wrapped in razor wire,
Hewn in halves, mewing.
I could hardly speak, thinking:
What is your language, Hartford Jew?
Surly not the Guten Tag I knew.
And how do you say “thank you”
when the words are biting and foreign?
Gratitude never was our forte.
No cards or a flower
For walking you through that far-off town,
Grass huts galore,
Hour after hour of monstrosity, a city
Pummeled by the mindless chatter of women
And men, both of them, yes, though mostly the latter.
Hartford Jew, you stand atop a pile
Of rubble in a picture I have of you,
A smile stretched across your face,
White grin shining in the sun,
And in your belt a gun,
Warm and smoking, recently shot.
I turn this picture over in my fingers
As I listen to your breathing, still lingering there.
Death is an island and I don’t speak the language.
I never learned until we met.
I was in pieces then, kaput, after seeing
A Bosnian baby quartered by the hands of war.
You stuck me back with string and glue.
I wanted to do the same for you, or more,
More than I could say for the child,
Always on the brink of death,
Coughing, hacking, short of breath.
I didn't know what to do.
So I took a ball of matzo dough
And made a model of yourself:
A gypsy girl with the blackest hair.
She had a word for everything,
Just like you,
For cock and for screw.
We fell in love. I said I do, I do.
But, the three of us still felt like two.
And If I left her. And I leave you.
And you’ll leave me too, the both of you.
Harford Jew, we’re no longer children.
Men move deathward to a moment when
You cease completely and I can speak again.
Relax, I’ll say. Auf wiedersehen.