Jason Sommer

In the gone world of Roman Vishniac’s book

of photographs of Jewish Eastern Europe,

which we sit down to look over,

my rather recognizes for certain only

the village idiot of a Munkács neighborhood,

Meyer “Tsits,” whom they use to tease:

“Your mother has breasts,”

the children would say as they passed,

and frothing with rage he would give chase

some years before breasts and Meyer were ash.

The Jewish parable goes

that in the waiting room

where all souls come, they leave

a bundle of their troubles

on hooks. At their return,

emerging from interviews,

they eye the parcels hung

in hundreds on the walls

with care, and take their own.

At the railhead Lilly saw him first, the binary motion of the stick,

among the stumbling shoals raused from the boxcars,

doling general death and fishing for his special interests –

twins, any anomaly: the hunchback father and clubfooted son –

unrhythmic metronome sending people to the left or right

onto different lines – death,    life,    death,    death, death death,    death –

or with a jerk of the thumb, a flick of the finger in white kid gloves,

arms in a half embrace of himself, left arm across his wrist propping

the right, which moved only from the wrist as he parted the living stream,

fingertip flick of the finger, jerk of the thumb, or conducting with that baton,

humming opera, tall Lilly thought and handsome, in his monocle

            and gloves –

not merely handsome, courtly in the way my aunt described him.