Aviya Kushner

Unexpected Autobiography

          In memory of Mark Strand.

For so many years, I was the girl waiting
for the train, scribbling.
I was not the man in the cowboy hat
on the roof of an old brick building,
the man I am watching now,
blowtorch in hand, burning some ancient duct
near the Granville El. I was not the tight-shirted guy
in the next building over, hammering
a new roof from scratch, the bare wood
beams visible to all, like a naked man,
unexpected, embarrassing, like a skeleton
the living are not allowed to see. I was not
the streetlight left on in daylight
by mistake, in a broke city that can’t
afford to err. The scribbling years
were all intentional, the deferred dreams
the dreams I chose to defer,
so that now I am exactly like the old man
who first taught me, who said he writes
on yellow legal pads on trains next to executives
who stare in disbelief or wonder.
 
How I loved him, how I love him.
Though he is dead now, to me he
and all poets live in present tense.
Even he was too embarrassed
to write poetry on public transit after a while,
he confessed. So on trains he scribbled notes.
In long lines, in what might look like an actual
job—and now that I am more than half the age
the old man was when he taught me,
I understand the pressure to have
an actual job, to look like it, and also
I have discovered that I am not
embarrassed at all. I am who I am,
a scribbler in public, a parasite, a believer.
I look at the scribbling girl less than half
my age waiting for the train, oblivious
to the blowtorch on the roof, the tight-shirted
man and his pectorals, the streetlight
left on in daylight and I thrill
for the past. On the platform I discreetly
dance in remembrance, in gratitude
for all the years I could not wait to get home
to write and so I wrote right there, anywhere,
by daylight or streetlight, and once in a while,
barefoot, by the glorious shine of starlight.

---

Guitar Music in the Desert

Nearly midnight in the student dorms
in the city of the patriarchs,
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
and what do I hear but guitar,
played loud, live, next door,
by a neighbor who sounds
no more than twenty-three?
How long have I been
in so many deserts, but
not this one: Be’ersheva,
desert capital, four thousand years old.
Abraham’s city, or so we are told.
 
Through all my deserts,
Biblical and secular,
I have remained on a student budget,
and here I am, twenty years
past graduation, writing in a borrowed dorm
on the green couch and wooden coffee table
with the glass showing welts in bamboo
and outside, there is Rachel,
who came here from Moscow
and now upholsters furniture
for a living and bargains like
a desert hooligan, a pirate of the sands.
 
I saw her lift a couch, alone,
like a man.
 
Why is it that in this emptiness
I feel full?  Give me just this: sleep,
sand, language, music. An upholsterer
with my mother’s name, Rachel,
selling her wares to penniless students at midnight,
reminding me that anything
can be transformed. Recovered. Lifted.
Let the patriarchs take care of the rest.

--
Aviya Kushner is the author of The Grammar of God (Spiegel & Grau) and Eve and All the Wrong Men (Dancing Girl Press). She is The Forward's language columnist and her essays, poems, and translations appear widely. Her first full-length poetry collection is forthcoming from Orison Books.