After Passover

Take away the knife

dishes at Passover washed

from the table, like the rocks

we placed on my father’s grave

when we lowered my mother in the ground.

Don’t expect a speech, throat

curled in on inappropriate flowers, throated

tight in someone’s hand, knife-

cut down the hill, not here, the ground

sacred according to the Rabbi, washed

like her body the day she died, grave

waiting without her wedding ring, no rock

but a ten dollar gold band from Brooklyn. Gone the rocking

chair at her father’s third floor walkup and throat

of lace her mother left behind, engraved

before my mother held a knife,

before she moved to London, washed

her hair in a sink when the Underground

stopped working. Maternal lineage grounded

her, the shore of Bremerhaven where a rock

broke open and her parents boarded a ship, washed

away from their deaths. But her own throated

words—what did they carry at the end? A knife

dropped at a dining table, grave

waiting? She knew, saying gravely

she couldn’t go on, leaning in a wheelchair, grounded

all day like a miscreant, no knife,

only fork and spoon, left hand rocking

back and forth, trying to clear her throat

to avoid choking, pureed food washed

in a blender. Before it came to this, she washed

her own hair for the last time, gravely,

the morning the clot throated

her brain. Stoppage of opera, grounded

from reading, where Elizabeth Bennet throws a rock

at her competitor. All the mail, I now open with a knife

though my throat sinks to the ground,

mud-washed in a dirty grave.

I throw rocks, brain open with a knife.