SHIRLEY KAUFMAN’S ROOTS IN THE AIR 279A kind of privilege. As if
they earned the right
through the exacting summer.
Look! They say for a moment.“It is difficult to get the news from poems,” Williams warns us, “yet men die
miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”
Old maps putting Jerusalem at the center of the world still serve today,
though storm center is more like it. “Autumn Crocus” offers personal witness.
While “The families” are Arab, this year’s rains bring cold and festering for
everyone. “The women,” all this land ’s women, “are sorting the bitter crop,”
the Mediterranean’s biblical fruit in need of curing. Then comes the season’s
gift: “clusters of lavender petals / explode from the soil / without any warning.”
Figures of speech are fair game, as in “leaves the color of burned-out / trucks.”
Here as in the day’s news a verb explodes over a line break, almost blotting out
these lavender petals. Yet they do what poems can do. “Look! They say for a
moment.”
In the Prologue to Claims, Kaufman’s tact, phrasing, and surprise find anxi-
ety in the promised land along with resurgences of life—here, a tree outside
her door.
Jacaranda
Because the branches hang down with blossoms
for only a few weeks, lavender clumps
that let go quickly
and drop to the ground,
because the flowers are so delicate
even their motion through the air
bruises them,
and they lie where they fall
like tiny pouches of shriveled skin,
because our lives are sagging with marvels
ready to fail us,
clusters of faces drifting away,
what ’s settled for is not nearly
what we are after, claims
we keep making or are made on us.
But the recurrence of change
can still surprise us, lilac
that darts and flickers
like the iridescent head of a fly,
and the tree making us
look again.