My Sister’s Genius                               1942 Along the narrow corridor I head for the john just as my father, unshaved in pajamas, steps from his room. He is reading pages of a letter I know my older sister had written, then delivered to his pillow as he slept—                       At dinner they had fallen into one of their discussions. He was not, certainly not, voting a 4th term for FDR. Like a lioness she defended Roosevelt's heart and courage in standing up for the poor. Their voices spiked like fever, broke off exhausted. He retreated to the radio to get the latest war news. She shut herself in our bedroom, wrote furiously for hours on one of his legal pads—                               In the hall he smooths her rumpled pages of round, flowing cursive. Eyes moist, voice trembling, he calls BASHELE— her Yiddish name—to all corners of the house; murmurs to himself such a mind, brilliant! as he passes me. I don’t need to read a line to grasp her genius. How I envy her, wonder if one day I, too, will know how to tell a man you’re wrong   all wrong   in such a way he not only listens                           but cries out with pleasure. © 2004 Betty Buchsbaum Thoughts about my writing life by Betty Buchsbaum The Long View I keep looking back over my shoulder as if the slender young woman he’d married forty years before has stepped into the room while I am packing and he is telling her of the article in the N.Y. Times about a writer’s conference in Vermont where all the poets sleep around—a bunch of naked souls in very naked bodies— and does she want that, his tight jaw insinuating she might. I want to shake his arm as if he’s talking wildly in his sleep, want to shout and break a plate or quip calmly about that young woman having, long ago, given us both the slip. But I stay quiet, packing my clothes, and wondering how long she may live in his flecked eye of memory—               as long, say, as it takes to become that old woman whose face I’d studied in a photograph: head a smooth skill nose an owl’s beak eyes milky clouds and he, an old man, still seeing in my face a young, dark-haired woman a poet desires to lead into bed by singing in her ear. © 2004 Betty Buchsbaum Moving through Checkout Lifting a gallon jug of spring water from cart     to checkout counter, you whisper My arms are getting stronger, did you notice?     Stalks of organic broccoli in my hand, I’m spun back to our room last night, nod yes,     your body rising over mine in bed our first time since your surgery. Broccoli!     I finger the bunch in my hand. All those stems and heads we've steamed and eaten, yet your cells     ran wild. Like one unsure of faith but whose lips still pray, I set the bushy greens     on top of our pile. Weighing it, the young woman at checkout leans across     the counter, her eyes searching our faces. How important is it, she sighs, to go to college?     The pointer of a scale tips back and forth in my head; it's hard enough     to calibrate importance for myself. Take one of my random lists: mulch     flower beds, return library books call daughters, write poem a day, learn     Italian, squeeze fresh garlic on broccoli for extra longevity. And why, of all people,     does she ask us? Unless it's the way we look: a white-bearded man in bookish horn rims     and a graying sixtyish woman wearing sensible shoes. Locking eyes with her, I say very important, yes!—     hating my no-doubt-about-it tone, yet wanting to take home, along with healthy food,     my willed voice of certainty. © 2004 Betty Buchsbaum Top of Page © 2004 Chicory Blue Press All rights reserved