Praise all things fixed and loose. Even when you can ride in horse-drawn cars, walk, to feel unstuck cobbles through your soles, to see leaves stuck to pebbled rectangles like jewels in velvet bodices, to peer from under elms at posters of Irving's Lear and Olga Nethersole's Camille. In magic boots, dance on spangled streets that discover you grateful to be an immigrant, a Jew. I gather years carved into stone arcades and cast on cornices, solid on ancestry, While I hear a man drum jazz on a kitchen pail. I find the Statue of Liberty draped in black for President Garfield's assassination, just as you did when your parents packed in Hungary for free schools.
Diamonds shine in the boat's spume.
I've had to shape them, for your past was gone under new asphalt. Copyright 1997 by Grace Schulman and 1995 by Sheep Meadow Press, all rights reserved. Any commercial use or republication requires the written permission of the author.