Ezra Becoming Kosher

Eleanor Stanford

What's memory but a shucked oyster, 

 salt rimed and shivering? 

                        At one and a half, 

 he pointed at the ceiling fan, said 

 rotate, as though his mouth was origin 

 of some first turning. 

So many rules to be a Jew, 

 my mother sighs, leaving behind 

 Long Island, Flatbush, Yiddishkeit. 

Ezra, balanced between the past 

 and a tender pork roast, puts down 

 his fork. 

What's memory but an omnivorous（杂食的） 

 shadow, cloven-hoofed? 

Whose memory? Not mine. 

Between what my mother won't cop to, 

 and what my son won't eat, I'm half-invisible, 

 half-confused. 

                        Already, at nine, he retreats behind his too-long 

 bangs and Bach inventions. 

And my mother, the hard bead of Ashkenazi 

 irony in her left breast cut out, radiated, her Judaism, too, 

 now in full remission. 

Memory, relentless bottom-feeder, 

 gatherer of refuse and debris --

                            And Ezra, turning 

 away, knowing: thou shalt not cook the calf 

 in its mother's milk; the animal should be bled 

 swiftly and just so, prayers said thus 

 over its bowed head.