Selected poems
Finding my grandfather
There is the photograph
of my father's father in military uniform,
an Austrian, serving in the Polish cavalry
in World War I, standing ramrod straight.
It is he whom I think of when
I find myself dowsing my genome for
answers regarding my origin, the deep
pull that draws me to the late symphonies
of Mozart, Rilke's angelic mysticism, and,
as a child, to Krapfen and Apfelstrudel.
However, how could I ever discount
the perpetual awe I find in Chopin's Etudes
and the wonder of the first and second
piano symphonies, the lyrical madness
in the short stories of Bruno Schulz.
That grandfather died shortly after returning
to his farm from the results of having been
a victim of a mustard gas attack in the war.
There are no photographs
of my mother's father, who it is said I am
a namesake, since she never fully recovered
from his premature death in an automobile
accident in New Jersey while driving home
in his Model-T Ford one stormy evening,
the spokes of two of the spinning wheels
splashing with falling rain as the car lay
on its side, overturned in a roadside ditch.
This was the grandfather who I heard
was beloved, and was referred to as being
reciprocal of such love in return. This
grandfather leaves no image from which I can
gaze, only the darkness from which he drank.
There needs not to be a photograph for
the grandfather I did have, known as Grandpa
Gorski, whom my mother's mother married
after the death of her Waju. This man I would
come to know as a boy of three, until he died,
three years later, when I had arrived at my full
precocity at the age of six. This grandfather
was not a true grandfather but more of one than
any of the others, the one who was the reconciler,
the steady one who intervened with wisdom,
who provided calm to the warring factions of my
father and grandmother, who resided in a house
of hysterics. I remember finding resolute trust
in this man in whom I recognized equanimity.
Moments before his death, he called for me,
and my grandmother took me to see him in their
room, so he could hear my playing ukulele for
him, a smile spread on his face beneath
the darkened circles around his eyes. How I can
still feel the hand he placed on my head, briefly,
before removing it, whereupon, he vacated
the body he had in that life, and, at least in my
imagination, arose into the storm winds that filled
the hurricane that ravaged the Floridian sky.
The view of the river
It was the view of the river
that