Chop Sui Generis
They were one of a kind, the
only proper way
To finish a Chinese meal,
little white balls,
We called them mothballs, and
to this day
There has never been anything
like them: one trawls
Through history in search of
something similar.
Impossible. It was sui generis and lives in memory
Alone. How could it be otherwise? We are
Creatures of our own
experience, and chicory
Cannot be confused with
coffee, pickles out of a barrel
Half-sour like nothing else,
so too the vanilla
Scoops after chow mein or
chop suey, the El
Overhead, the late afternoon
rain, keeps falling.
It is sometime in late 1944
and we are in Brooklyn.
On the other side of the
ocean, if I had known,
Uncles, aunts, cousins and
grandparents were murdered.
Not in anonymous millions,
but one by one,
Each alone. I was four years old, afraid
Because my mother and her
mother remembered
What I had never known, could
not imagine, made
Aware only decades later when
no one was left to ask
Why did they look at me that
way and say my task
Was to eat my food, grow
strong, and be a mensch.
If I had seen the smoke on
the horizon and smelled the stench
From the other side of the
world, I never could have grown:
But not long after, one after
another my grandparents died,
and then my mother fell
apart. I cried,
of course, but did not
understand. In a dark
Chinese restaurant, no matter
where, after the chow
Mein or the chop suey, I
order vanilla ice-
Cream, little round white
balls, very stark,
Not kosher but still sacred,
like prayers that splice
The Sabbath to the ordinary
week and watch the flow
of history as Havdallah candles
twist and glow.
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