Jose Kozer
This Is the Book of Psalms That Made My Mother Dance
This is the book of psalms that made my mother dance,
this is the book of hours my mother gave me,
this is the stern book of precepts.
Enraged and impelled, I come before this gaunt book,
I come before it like a rabbi to dance a sovereign polka,
I come before it in the height of glory to dance with ceremony a minuet,
death’s clandestine arm-around-the-arm.
Goose stepping, I come before it to dance while smoking,
I’m a rabbi who raised his gown in the Russian steppes,
I’m a rabbi that an enormous czar forces to dance before the bastions
of death,
I’m Grandfather Leizer who danced ceremoniously pressed to the
waist of Grandmother Sara,
I’m a damsel who arrives — all wanton — to expand the borders of
this dance,
I’m a damsel distended by a sudden confusion of the ankles,
but death imposes disorder on me,
and there’s a vase falling in the large shelves of my room,
there’s a lustrous and farcical misstep,
and my feet are like a loud bellowing of four generations of the dead.
(Translated from the Spanish by Orlando Ricardo Menes)
Jose Kozer
Desolation of Rebb Leizer
For Jacob Kovadloff, with Sonia
It was his harsh homeland: the village Chejonov.
Rebb Leizer, head shaved, shuffled in his slippers through the ovens of
coal.
Rebb Leizer warehoused insatiable tons of potatoes in the tunnels of a
house.
A tiny man, he felt the salt of attrition with his fingertips.
And with his fingertips the tiny man raised the exhalation of the psalms.
His voice burned amid the red craters of a chronology.
The tip of his index dripped a thick wine.
Rebb Leizer distributed gold’s temptation among his children.
With his intransigent walking stick he evaded the rustic roundness of
bread.
Elbow leaning on the counter of torment,
he didn’t know the sudden leaping of fish, the foggy decision of a port.
His seven children perished
between the ancestral gears of war:
Rebb Leizer affirming the stump of suffering.
Rebb Leizer jotting down paradigms in a sacred book.
(Translated from the Spanish by Orlando Ricardo Menes)
Jose Kozer
Lupe Singing in the Kitchen
Lupe singing in the kitchen,
the whole earth marinated by Lupe,
Lupe is piles of sugar in Havana’s docks,
and I again emigrate to the saltpeter,
I again emigrate to the land filled with strings of Czechoslovakian
garlic,
Lupe, a schoolgirl in Catholic Cantabria,
today Lupe glowingly says goodbye to her mother,
there she is again, dipping bread in the essential wine of my
grandparents.
(Translated from the Spanish by Orlando Ricardo Menes)
Jose Kozer
Mom’s Grammar
In May, which bird was it
that mom loved: or did she talk about mimosas?
Says she doesn’t remember the names of rivers that circumscribed her
home town:
even though in the summer a male and a female would always drown,
a male
and a female in the summer. Mentions
a crucial conversation
with her sisters: they’re like friends intertwined by the little finger;
they’ll leave. What despondency, even though
in the cabins
there’s a centerpiece with tropical fruit, on deck there are beautiful
harlots who speak a guttural language,
aviation doesn’t amaze them,
not even the transatlantic cable; gaping sparrows rouse
letters or discharge
butterflies of light. They’ll arrive
amid talcum-powdered boys, the aromatic scent of their tresses will
disseminate through Havana’s streets: Apodaca,
Teniente Rey, Acosta;
they’ll end up purchasing
a mahogany chifforobe — with some tepid initials on the
undergarment’s drawer — that will work
as a strongbox too. By then they’ll have settled down,
soon they’ll attend Zionist seminars to address one another in the
familiar tu; mom in proper Castilian.
(Translated from the Spanish by Orlando Ricardo Menes)
