Three Poems by Fran Schumer

 

 

The Reference Room at the Jersey City Library

 

Thanks for calling me, a voice not a recording,

in faltering English — your book is ready.

 

Thanks for working at the library, hours now limited,

closed Sundays, Wednesdays, Fridays.

 

Thanks for this building, old but beautiful, the marble stairs,

decorative iron railings, skylight, built in better days.

 

People came to read more than magazines.

Now some come to learn coding.

 

Thanks for the free computers.

Upstairs, an empty room.

 

Look at this, my husband says.

Rows and rows of reference books.

 

We walk along the silent aisles.

“Twentieth Century Literary Criticism,” untouched.

 

Thanks for all 52 volumes.

Thanks for this unused collection of Poetry Criticism.

 

It starts at the “Twa Corbies,” vol. 1. No one has checked any out.

Thanks for updating it anyway: Kevin Young, Volume 85.

 

Thanks for the complete set of the New Cambridge Medieval History,

all twelve volumes!  Thanks!

 

And … the Encyclopedia of the North American Colonies, including Nordic, Central

and Southeastern Europe. Western Europe updated this year to include information

about the War in Ukraine. Thanks!

 

Thanks for the books of maps, dishes, pottery;

Native American, enslaved people’s histories.

 

Thanks for the Encyclopedia of the Ghettos.

Thank you for this terrifying shelf, and this other — a History of Concentration Camps.

 

Thanks for reminding me that books like these, all of these, in every aisle, were burned —

and even if hardly anyone ever looks at them, they’re here.

 

Thanks.

 

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

 

Wash Ashore

 

We sold a piano,

tossed books into dumpsters,

parents into graves.

 

This is what happens

when you move to an island

in later years —

 

Your roots like new grass

planted on eroding dunes,

too frail to grab on to new life.

 

Then one day you see a man

in yoga class you met at a party

the other night. A new root takes hold.

 

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

 

Triggering Town, 1967

— homage to an essay by Richard Hugo on poetic theory

 

This is my town that no longer exists,

my father’s store now a boutique —

The scent of roach spray brings tears

though it’s been years

since vats of chemicals crowded

the rear of that dark, gloomy space,

years since I breathed the poisons

he mixed on paper plates,

petals around the stick shift

of his tiny Hillman Husky car,

its color a lovely powder blue.

 

This is my town that no longer exists.

Grates covered the doors

of the store after break ins.

After one, my father and brother

drove at midnight to board up

the hole in the roof. I was a girl,

exiled at home in my bed,

imagining that hole, and beyond it

stars in the dark, velvet sky.

I could dream. Shy, my father

was shy with me, his only daughter.

When he told me what they had

to clean from the floor, he did not

use an expletive. Instead, he said

the burglar was so scared, he –

and this my father bent to whisper –

“defecated.” My father said this

without malice or disgust, only pity.

 

This is my town that no longer exists,

my mother ailing, my father deep

in a grave I will visit maybe once,

that town so far in the past,

beneath leafy branches,

an arcade over a city street.

On a bench in a park, he points

to the shape of a perfect tree.

This is beauty, he says.

This was my triggering town.