Where I’m From

I was recently introduced to the “Where I’m From” poetry template. It’s a great exercise, particularly if you spend some time on George Ella Lyon’s website looking at her explanation of the form and its value. I tried to follow the template faithfully, but as so often happens with me, the rule-follower and the rebel clashed. I took poetic license (it is, after all, a poem, right?) in order to be faithful, in the exercise, to both sides of my family.

My parents came from very—and I mean very—different places, and I tend to vacillate between the two in my sense of identity. They divorced when I was ten, and I never knew them as any kind of a “unit.” I was extremely close to my father’s Russian-Jewish-Marxist-restlessness, and identify most closely with his personality and ethos. But my mother’s Mayflower roots run deep and I cannot ignore or shed that part of myself. The sound of ocean waves hitting the rocks of my childhood summers on the North Shore of Boston are my heartbeat, as much a part of me as my father’s insatiable search for justice, equity, and hope. The “Where I’m From” exercise gave me a chance to toss all of this together on the page. Here’s what I came up with:

WHERE I’M FROM

I am from a salmon-colored VW bus crossing the country in 1959, cast-iron pans,
and tea glasses lifted from Howard Johnson’s before it was HoJo’s
because that’s how tea is brewed in Russia.

I am from belongings stuffed in moving vans, small dark rooms,
and the smell of new carpet and paint.

I am from Boston Ivy clutching old brick walls,
Atlantic tides sucked up by the moon,
birch and dark fir forests and the Baltic sea.

I am from oranges-never-chocolate in Christmas stockings and a half-full glass,
from dinner toasts where everyone clinks glasses over and over again,
from Halsted, Hopkinson, Curtis, from Fischer, from a Russian name no one at Ellis Island could pronounce.

I am from unlined index cards bought by the thousands, scribbled on in green Flair pens,
strewn on the floor as reminders of everything from shopping lists to Dylan quotes to Times editorials.
I am from odd ceramic bowls in every room filled with beach stones and sea glass.

From the reported dangers of drinking too much milk
and the absolute necessity of fingernail brushing.

I am from dreidels and foil-wrapped chocolate coins at Channukah,
matzoh and money at Passover,
dyed eggs and the UU church at Easter,
mysterious stories all around.

I am from Redwood City California, and Latvia,
England, and Ireland, mussels and lobster,
smoked fish on black bread that is Russian soul food.

From the time my father swam a mile out into the ocean to reach the island on a dare
or perhaps to escape my grandmother-his-mother-in-law,
from the bruise on my mother’s thigh from climbing
into the rescue boat that went after him,
and her mother’s upside-down-V worried brow.

I am from that crumbling house on the Atlantic
where summer is a verb and the view is all in all,
with its generations of family portraits,
my great-grandmother’s diaries
(describing in single sentences each birth of her five daughters
in the bed that is still there),
the veil worn when great-great-great aunt somebody curtsied before Queen Victoria--
it became the family wedding veil
but was crumbled to dust when I unfolded it for my first wedding,
(like that marriage) crumbled to so much dust.

I am from the family apartment in Moscow’s Arbat where the voices
my father heard were Robeson and Reed, Gorky and Checkhov.
I am from my father’s love of the Catskills full of birch and dark fir like Russia,
his shelves of books and cases of files, unfinished stories,
photo albums that now fill my shelves to tell his story,
his longing to change the world
and mine.