Jack Galmitz


Judaism 101 

You play catch with your father
until the sky is as black as the family Schnauzer.

Upstairs, your mother bathes and waits
to call you to bring her a towel.

Don’t worry. It will all work out. Maybe
you will experiment first with yourself and others later.

Eventually you will find a wife. Maybe,
You will meet her at a reunion or a wedding.

You will not understand what she’s saying. You will just
watch the tongue moving, wet and juicy, in a cavity, 

like a woman bathing only different.
You needed someone and she appeared like magic.

Remember the hallways and stairs.
Your history. How you got here.

God walks hard in this place. His boots are steel tipped
and his coat is black leather. With your bride of showers,

you’ll return by train, relaxing with a cigar,
looking out at distances, to the garden of your begetters.






Sonnet iii

Squeezed out the last good paint
from the tube. So many have to
wait in tent cities sprung up
on foreign shores for their chance to go.
Makes me think of backyards where wild corn 
grows and immigrants take up farming 
to stock their pantries. I wait for you
to say I do, and yes, because
angels have four faces
and human hands to touch us,
if we dare approach them.
My father saw rabbits going to work,
he said, and we laughed at him, but now
he’s gone. And we wait our turn.



The Idler 

I do not understand the things that thrive
in earth and rain and air. They're too austere.
I'm an ordinary man. I talk to birds that land
near my feet and tear at bits of bread

then leave. The birds are pretty clear.
The trees from which they alight are dim.
The branches in the sky project as if
there was nothing else to do besides.

Purpose need not be summarized
is one message I take from this.
Then put down roots that spread
to live. They grow by protecting their softer

self. This to me qualifies as intent,
though I'm not one-hundred percent certain of this.







Sitting on a Bench in the Dark

I met my father
at the high school track.
We had no appointment.
It was just like that.
I was sitting on a bench
not waiting for the bus.
It was under the locust trees
and in the dark.
I was dreaming as I sat 
looking at the fresh clay.
He was just there and spoke
with a soft voice.
He uttered my name.
That's how I knew it was him.
He asked me how I'd been
and I trembled a bit.
No one had asked me for years,
decades it was really.
He didn't ask me again.
There was no reason to pry.
My bent back and shielded face
were enough for him to know. 



On Being and Matters

I have a better mustache
than Martin Heidegger had
and he dressed in public 
in a Nazi uniform, and, well,
I'm Jewish. I'm not better.
I'm not saying that.
But what's all this about
being, as if I didn't have it.
Some secret that is. As hidden
as the rooms of a motel after
a tornado ripped the walls off it.
I've been to the kitchen.
I've prepared dishes.
I've stood at the edge of the sea
when the sun sank as unceremoniously
as a poached egg spreading in 
a roiling pot of water.
So, what isn't? 
My mustache has swagger.
I can twirl it in my fingers.
Heidegger’s couldn’t manage it. 







To start over

The thought of it is tiring.
To separate the metal plates
welded together
requires equal force and new effort.

Now the form is finished,
a realization. To undo it
requires relinquishing
prior interpretations.
The undoing will initiate
a beginning and that is creation.

Where it's begun is of little
matter. The cutter thinking,
the strikes of hammer, must be as deeply
felt as was the original making.
It is love, after all, that takes it apart
as it was put together.

Jack Galmitz was born in 1951 in New York City. He attended the public schools from which he graduated. His poems have appeared in journals such as otata, Synchronized Chaos, Former People, Fleas On The Dog, and others. He is married to Yali Zhang, a calligrapher born in Mainland China.

 
 

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