SHIRLEY KAUFMAN’S ROOTS IN THE AIR 277From Claims, “Chosen” begins not with nature imaging history but imaged by
history, for once.
Leaves are the color of burned-out
trucks on the road to Jerusalem. Obsolete
armor. Grapes in the market
already smell of wine,
and the flies tap sugar
from their overstuffed skins.
We think we can smell the rain too,
smashing its tiny mirrors in the north
as if what we waited for
might come.
Chosen for what? The live carp
flap in their vats. They think
they should be flying.
I take one home in a plastic bag.Trucks left as they fell along the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem road lend their color to
autumn leaves, though any rusted metal would do—barrel hoop, plowshare.
Since 1948 it took flame, then rain and sun to make a rough dark russet now a
figure of speech.
In Israel, as elsewhere, Kaufman finds nature closely, sometimes corrosively
touched by history. So is human nature, of course. While the poem’s and a
people ’s title word “Chosen” lingers over this poem, there ’s still shopping to do.
Get close enough to smell wine in the grapes and the flies dismay you. You’re
too close, a heartbeat from “armor” to “Grapes,” then flies “tap” sugar from
“overstuffed skins.” Waiting for Messiah and something sooner, we look north
for rain “smashing its tiny mirrors”—a split-second image, rain smashing what
might have shown us something.
Kaufman’s title has been ticking away on the road to Jerusalem, in the mar-
ket, through a parched summer, the word “chosen” a nagging question. Now
it surfaces: “Chosen for what?” Instead of an answer, “The live carp / flap in
their vats.” Messianic, Chagallesque, they dream of flying, while she ’s of the
chosen people in a promised land and can “take one home in a plastic bag.” A
vapid music undercuts the dream: flap, vats, plastic, bag.
Those late rains everyone waits for sound a litany throughout Kaufman’s
poems. In “Déjà Vu,” a story of Sarah and Hagar,
The air ticks slowly. It ’s August
and the heat is sick of itself
waiting all summer for rain.