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