Kakamayme Sailor

My Aunt Fanny scrambles eggs with her right hand. Her
left clutches a postcard from her kakamayme brother
Eugene. He’s in Galveston, Barcelona, Casablanca.
He’s a sailor in Tangiers, Dar es Salaam, Bombay
Macao. In Osaka he’s my uncle. At sixteen
he jumps ship --an orthodox Jewish home.

“Now THAT was farkakta” my aunt says --
remembers her mama’s grieved chores
scrubbing sheets, scrubbing floors. He was her first born --
and her papa’s infirm denial as he lay
with consumption, in exile, in a dark room
in the back of the house. Meanwhile

Eugene does the gandy-dance on rail beds
on the Nevada scrub plain. In his torn
coveralls --he alternates a shovel and pick axe
in his young, unschooled hands. One night
bunked in a freight car
on a siding
under forever Montana skies
he sees pictures of foreign ports. Figures
the rails don’t go far enough,
long enough
from his father’s arm
wrapped in supple leather tifillin --

same arm bears the strop
each time Eugene
sneaks back in the house
from the pool hall
in his forbidden knickerbockers. The
shipping lines don’t hire Jews --
'fraid they’ll abandon ship - start davoning
on a muggy Shanghai dock while
pork barrels thaw in the hold. So, he changes
his name. What’s he say to the Bohunk,
Pole, Mick or Wop when they ask him

what he is, where’s he frum? Maybe
he passes for Greek or
Italian, like his shipmates, Demitrius or
Salvio. They barely speak English - but know
their mother’s tongue. Does he mutter Yiddish
lullabies as he rocks to sleep
slung over the cold Atlantic? What’s he sing
while he paints hulls and fore decks and aft decks
and bows -- while he scans his endless world? He reads
and floats. Reads and floats -- Hemmingway, Faulkner,
Wolfe. What does he imagine himself to be? Where’s
he going to find himself when he finds himself
in Havana, Capetown, Savannah?

When my father passes, Eugene
sends the first telegram I ever read:
“WORDS CANNOT EXPRESS MY SORROW
STOP.” Stop what? “Stop 
asking me ‘bout my brother who shielded our mother
who bent to Papa’s will. Stop asking me home on leave --
forebear a Thanksgiving eve meal, mama
begging me to stay, just
one more day.”

He tires of holiday dinners, tires of the rituals --
the aproned women retreat to the kitchen, the
awed men drift to the den
fire-up the Havana’s he unpacks along with
white-face Geisha dolls
wrapped in silk. They smile seductions
under glass while the men wink and
ask about the girls in
Singapore and Sydney and Liverpool and Gdansk,
while all that’s foreign to Eugene
is in this room
in Milwaukee.