Stanislavsky and Methods

Before Kaddish, during the burial,
the ground dream too iced-over for hacking
into, the mother came up to me,
hair ablaze and said, thanks
for the poems about my daughter,
and I said, listen, this is not real,
but I always wanted to play
in a synagogue, marbled voices
and yellowing walls and she was kind
to me, a stranger in town, a fine actress.

In the morning the world was frigid
near Hoboken, my inverted hell, the Hudson
giftwrapping in ice polluted birds.
Happy holidays to you upstate New York.
Cosmic exams ask tectonic plates
to shift south, misshaping the coast.
The daughter still lives in the Village, surrounded
by scripts of Hungarian rapings, CD’s
of Bessie Smith, neighbors after
midnight with small sores
lining their lips, not living
the dogged code that everyone should
breathe. She remains alert
to her mother’s new home, vivid
from freedom, emotional territories
widening with each winter.
Her mother is a true believer

in Jewish Miracles, the daughter,
a blurred fax not so carefree
about the hasty withdrawals of men
and minutes, kept awake
by the nightly screaming of gays
upstairs, everyone else in the building
too drunk on TV and Ecstasy
to notice that Manhattan shrinks
more than usual from record lows,
the island, sold and stolen many times over,
that never weeps, or rather, always
weeps, tears flooding up from the sewers
into the laps of the homeless
who scribble memos on bags:
Dearest Mother:
please forgive me but I can’t live
in the warmth of the South
or your Temple, and where is father,
and I can’t remember my childhood
and there’s no real need
to keep on reading or caring--
you will be runned down enough
from the coming Potomac heat,
and, gee, how lucky and blessed
you are to have a healthy single daughter
willing to illustrate the awful perfect truths
about welcomed random calamities
that at least invent permanently,
as if they were part of a crowd or seedy novel
about the dramatics of atheism with an ending
enigma forcing her to enact
infamous roles in her bed about leaving.