Sueños
by James Reiss
In my dreams I
always speak Spanish.
The cemetery may be
in Brooklyn ,
and I may be
kneeling on a rise
looking out at the
skyline of the city,
but I will whisper, Mira el sol.
And it is true the
late morning
sun will turn that
bank of skyscrapers
the color of
bleached bone in Sonora
and all the window
washers of Manhattan
will white-out like
a TV screen
in Venezuela
But the gray face on
the headstone photograph
has a nose like my
father’s,
and his voice had
the lilt of the ghettos
of central Europe .
So I should kneel
lower and say something
in Yiddish about
fathers, grandfathers,
the hacked limbs of
a family tree
that reaches as high
as Manhattan
I should say, Grampa, I loved those times
we ran through the underpasses in Central
Park, you with your cane, I with my ice
cream cones, shouting for echoes,
bursting out into sunlight—
if I only knew the
language to say it in.
~
first published in The New Yorker
