Friday, November 2, 2012

Poem Day.




chorus


“Still we’re often told, ‘seek and ye shall find.’”
                        - Ira Gershwin

Music was born in me
In a place you would never imagine
In a synagogue in Detroit, Michigan
A cement triangle hanging out onto the service drive
That ran next to Telegraph Road
Lines of stained glass running up its middle
In velvet heels on the marble lobby floor
Winter wind sticking under the skin of black tights
In the waxy smell of my aunt and cousin’s lipstick
As we’d kiss silent hellos
While I stepped past them in our pew to get to my seat:
There is where music began.

It was there
In the same prayers with the same tune year after year
My father harmonizing in his clear tenor.
Synagogue is not like church
There is no choir swaying and clapping
Moving to the music
The singers are hidden behind a façade
Their voices are piped out into the air
So they come from nowhere
From the core
The voice of the creation of God
And my father and his brother sang along
In their matching navy blue sport coats
Faces buried in the prayer book
Despite knowing it by heart a lifetime ago.

When I got old enough I sang as well          
Tried to match my dad’s harmonies
Pronounced the s’s instead of the t’s, like all the old guys did
An ancient way to speak a time worn language
I listened to the way my father repeated the English after the rabbi in a monotone, emotionless voice
And I copied him
Extolled the beauty of God like I was dictating a legal letter

When I was twelve
I learned the mournful tune of my Torah portion
For my bat mitzvah
I practiced until I had it memorized
And on the day
I was perfect
Not a single note or pronunciation incorrect
Not a single crack of the throat
My little girls’ voice was a bell ringing out into the sanctuary
The Rabbi told my parents
That in all his years of doing bar and bat mitzvahs
I was the best he’d ever heard
My father was unbearably proud
I thought it was because perfection was important to him
I know now
It’s because that was the last time
I did exactly what he wanted me to
The last time I actually wanted to do it
In the years to come we would crash up against each other
I became quick to shriek and swear
Quick to slam my bedroom door as hard as possible
Against his acid tone
More and more like him
Until he was astounded by me
Until we had no idea how to live in the same house.

It would be years before we’d find common ground
I had moved to California
I had no synagogue
But I wrote songs
He’d send me old sheet music, Irving Berlin and George Gershwin
Thick manila envelopes travelling across ten states to get to me
Speaking to me in the only common language
We knew
Still no words to explain
That the Mahzor and my notebook serve the same purpose
That the prayers I learned at six years old
Are carved so hard into my memory that I sing them
When I am alone cooking dinner
That all of it,
Torah portions and screams and slammed doors
The Viper Room at midnight on a Tuesday and my upright piano in my first apartment
The words of a rabbi and “Someone to Watch Over Me”
The piles of sheet music in his den
and the cds stacked against my teenage bedroom wall
All of it is just
Us
Singing

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