my grandmother
by Sy Kahn

In her old age
My Grandmother ate nickel hotdogs
At orange stands in New York City
So that she might press
Into my hands a few crisp dollars
From her delicate fingers.

"And you shouldn't smoke," she'd say,
Slipping me a carton of cigarettes.
But by then I was a war veteran.
And too big to be bossed.

Russian and Jewish,
Which means ample and beautiful
And loving, her blue eyes
Made me grow all my life,
And the accent she never lost
In all her American years
Gave a soft accent to my life.

Small, beavybosomed (four daughters
She outlived three) -
I remember that she never moved
Quickly. She moved down a street
Like eternity, coming and going.

For me there was always gentleness,
A lavender laugh and a smile
That could light Siberia,
And even flash away
The gathered gloom of my
Young man's heart.

And she died,
Struck by a stroke
That cut to the nerve,
But even in her last days,
Drifting into the past,
As if death were a slow
Reeling of her life backwards
Through time, she sang her old
Russian Yiddish nursery rhymes,
And somehow looked younger
At her death
Than in her last, lonely days.

I felt a world slip
Away from me, only half-known,
Half-grasped, the last
Of the Europeans I could call family.
We were all Americans by then,
Veteran Americans even; she
Slipped back a long distance,
Far out of reach before her
Last breath came, beyond
The Statue of Liberty, and across
The sea, across the round of Europe,
Back to an obscure Russian town,
A stranger singing her way back
To her exotic cradle
And to her grave.

We buried her in New Jersey
Among strangers.
I have never gone back
To visit her grave.
Russia is closer than that trip.
Why should I -
What she left, I have.