Green Elevators

Jean Nordhaus

I dream two old Jews washing dishes
in last night’s Japanese restaurant,
keening and kvetching in Yiddish.
One sings a song the Nazis made him sing
rowing down the river past his village,
a Polish song of girls and love and soldiers.
The other hums along and weeps. What
are they doing here, out of time and place,
two old DPs, stirring my sleep? Their keening

wakes me to a windy courtyard in the projects,
where my grandmother’s babushka’d friends
would perch on winter afternoons, a flock
of black birds, blown in by hunger and war,
cliff–high walls of four–apartment blocks
enclosing them (the halls identical, the elevators
color coded so a child could not get lost). On iron
benches they roosted, clucking and crying
in Yiddish, in English: “In America,
there is so much to eat.” We take home the food

we can’t finish: last night, foil caskets
of rice and fish, each wrapped like a gift
in a nest of bright scallions. Afterward
we put on our shoes and walked out,
into the night, the wind. Wind
still circles the globe, scattering lives
like tea leaves. Three clocks strike
in the dark, each telling a different time. In my
grandmother’s halls, the elevators were green.

Jean Nordhaus divides her time between Washington, DC, and New Mexico. Her most recent poetry collections are Innocence (Ohio State University Press) and The Porcelain Apes of Moses Mendelssohn (Milkweed Editions).

“Green Elevators” appears in our Winter 2009 issue.