What is left to us? Left for us? Left by us? Maybe I’m not alone in pondering these questions more with every passing year. I picture lives set in kind of a patchwork quilt made up of the families and circumstances we’re born into and those we make for ourselves, the outside events that have a part in shaping our private worlds, and what is left behind when we have gone.
You can purchase a copy of Leavings at:
Grolier Poetry Book Shop, 6 Plympton Street, Cambridge
Brookline Booksmith, 249 Harvard Street, Brookline
Newtonville Books, 10 Langley Road, Newton
or from me at ellen(at)ellensteinbaum(dot)com
What people are saying…
“Some poets go for the grand gesture, write about war and pestilence and the like. In “Leavings,” Ellen Steinbaum takes a different tack; she looks at a mouse that found its way into her house and meditates about “what is allowed to build/ a fence around its space and name it home.” She considers the rabbit that appears in her garden, and “stayed unmoving while we/ stood breathless at being chosen/ for animal benediction…”
Were she a painter, one might call her a “miniaturist” who realizes what this reader wishes more poets knew–that sometimes profound truths are tucked away in the smallest, quietest corners.”
— Charles Coe, Author, Purgatory Road
And here are some poems from it, starting with the title poem:
Leavings
Who will want them? What
to do with them? The
photographs are easy—
boxes, give out duplicates,
toss extras, then the birthday
cards and scribbled notes and
letters home from camp, but what
about all those perfect leather gloves
waiting unworn in their patient pairs,
tablecloths folded and ready for
gathering around, and thimbles, buttons,
hooks and eyes, Dorcas dressmakers’
steel pins in a round embellished tin
they don’t make anymore, and spools
of thread (J & P Coats mercerized cotton
John Wanamaker thirty cents): a personal
museum of things, relics made or touched
by hands I’ve known?
Commitment
The story I am finding charming
is, would you believe, about
cockroaches, pairs of them,
an Asian species: Salganea taiwanensis,
and, even stranger, about their taste
for each other, yes actually slight
cannibalsim. No, listen, it’s not quite
as disgusting as it sounds: the pairs
are newly mated, moving into new
homes where they will raise their babies
and they begin by taking turns
chewing on each other’s wings—
eating them down to stubs–each
lying quietly while the other feasts.
And though, yes, I’d find the bugs
disgusting, and hope their new homes
are not near mine, don’t you, too,
see it an endearing way to start a life
together, showing you will never fly away?
In the story I heard
they were infants, children of old friends, betrothed
before they could walk the land that was, then,
still the czar’s. In the story I heard they met and
she refused him—pale, thin scholar—then
fell ill, recovered only after the promise was
renewed. And then the story pauses and
we know only that after decades, children,
long journey, new language, here on silent film
grandchildren crowd around them as they
lean toward one another and, though
we hear no words, we see them
smile in slightly bewildered surprise.
in memory of Alta and Isaac Cahan (my great-grandparents)
This one is from a group I did as a sort of COVID diary–when we made masks, when we learned how to use Zoom, when we had crazy “COVID dreams.” Remember?
What the Skin Hungers For
the heartfelt handshake, yes, or
hug of course, but maybe even more
what would have passed unnoticed then:
the slight encountering of edges as we
leaned into one another on subway seats
enlarged in winter by layers of sweaters,
coats and, through our clothes, the stranger’s
arm was simple presence only, hardly felt,
the way in narrow theater seats, a sleeve to
sleeve or even briefest brush of flesh to flesh
occurred below the level of intrusion,
leaving now only a vague insistent drone:
the aching touch of what is absent.
One of the things I find most horrifyingly unfathomable about the killing of George Floyd…
The Time It Took
For the moment ignore the subduing,
the bringing to ground and consider only
this:
what it feels like to hold the position
on the unsteady surface for that long—twice
as long as you would sit at your
kitchen table waiting for French press
coffee, longer perhaps than lowered
in a pew or beside a hands-folded, head-
bowed child—holding steady, never
shifting weight from your one trembling
knee, one burning thigh even as you feel
the pulsing upward desperately at first, then
less.
Consider how it would feel to continue
pushing down, to feel the rumble of shouted
words then heavy quiet while you continue
bearing down. Imagine that you lay one
steadying hand on ground beside you and feel
stiffness in your legs as you arise
from what might, in another circumstance,
have been a pose of reverence.
in memory of George Perry Floyd, Jr.
“The Intervening Day” we call it:
the day between his birthday and our
anniversary, between the beginning of
his days and the formal beginning of our
days together, between these two occasions
for cards and cakes, good wishes, celebrations,
this one day that has no ritual, just
an everyday day, a day we notice perhaps only
because it sits sandwiched between the two
momentous ones, a day when nothing further
is required than our simple gratitude for
one more ordinary day.
To purchase a copy of Leavings by mail, email me at ellen(at)ellensteinbaum(dot)com.
