POEM - Foot Massage

All she wants is a foot massage.

It is not an engagement ring.

It is not a thirty-year adjustable rate mortgage
With points.

It is not a deposition given under sworn oath
Beneath the hawkish glare of some
Reptilian lawyer.

It is not a cell phone service contract
Shackling you into generational
Slavery

Or some deal to address and mail ten
Envelopes to your neighbors
For the American Cancer Society.

It is not even like pregnancy
Or having a vasectomy:

It is just a foot massage.

It is the hug of bare feet as they sink
Slightly when first stepping
Onto brand new carpet.

It is that moment in your bed
When you look over at your clock
And realize you have one hour more of sleep.

It is the meniscus edge of that first
Gulp of water that sluices down your
Throat on a hot afternoon.

It is the tight grip of the bed sheet as you
Pull it around bare shoulders
The first cold night before we use heat.

It is the feeling of wearing long pants
For the first time after a summer
Of wearing shorts.

It holds all the smugness of some
Post-coital smirk.

It is the blood red moon that sits
Deep deep in the dark of your eye.

Dead, Again

Oct.2007

“A coward dies many deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once.” – William Shakespeare, Julius Ceaser.


Boy, Shakespeare had it so wrong.

This weekend I journeyed to my childhood home for the last time. I went down to gather with my brothers and sisters to help my Mom move from her house of fifty plus years to another house further out on Long Island. Where suburban spread had scattered my siblings who remained on the Island, my Mom stuck fast to the small house in Franklin Square, a suburb just outside of Queens and a short 35 minute train ride into New York City.

When I spoke with her earlier in the week she mentioned how everyone was going to be stopping by to help with the move. I told her, of course, that I would be down to lend my back and heart to the move and I could tell she was relieved. “Oh, that would be great!” she said. I could tell that she had landed the answer I knew she had been fishing for.

I drove down Saturday morning over the same route I had for the last twenty years. When I pulled up to the house the movers were just finishing closing the truck and I could see my Mom sitting on the stairwell that led to the upstairs with the front door wide open. It was a very warm October day and the sun drenched the house with a sort of golden-amber hue.

With my old Minolta 202 slung over my shoulder, I took some pictures of the outside of the house. “You a photographer?” one of the movers asked me. “Nah, just one of the movers,” I replied. When I stepped into the living room it was bare and the emptiness caught me completely off guard. I heard myself wheeze lightly, as if I had been sucker punched and my breath was drawn out against my own will. For the years I’d lived here, I had never seen the rooms so barren.

I hugged my Mom and thought how stoic and frail she looked. She smiled, but it was a smile of duty. She had been through a lot over the months with the sale of the house. I know the physical strain had taken its toll, but there was the emotional toll that we really never talked about. I had seen this look once before. It was at Daddy’s funeral a million years ago she wore that look: that look of uncertain weariness.

Thank God my sister Denise was there, directing the movers and my mother with the skill of Patton moving his tanks against German Panzer divisions. Together we cleaned up what remained: some clothes, a mirror, some plants, some switch-plates. We stood by the wrought iron railing that led to the upstairs, the same railing we used to slide down when we were kids. We were considering what else had to be loaded into the last of the cars when Denise unscrewed the decorative brass finial that adorned the end of the banister and tucked it into her bag. We used to do the same thing as kids but then we would use the brass ornament like a microphone and sing into it. “The new owners won’t mind if we take this,” my sister said. We kept finding pennies and nickels and dimes and quarters on the floors of the empty rooms. We would pick them up, only to find more later on. “It’s Daddy,” Denise said. “He’s trying to tell us something.” When the movers and Denise left, it was just my Mom and I. I went from room to room and took pictures. Then I just stood in each room and recalled some event that took place in each of the rooms. I touched the dark pine paneled walls of the upstairs rooms where Joe and I lived through our high school years. I stood on the exact spot where my trundle bed stood and recalled as if it were yesterday that morning when my brother-in-law climbed the stairs to wake Joe and me to give us the news about Daddy’s passing after his stroke on that day that changed everything for all of us.

I went into the garage where I had once destroyed my sister’s ten speed when I was first learning how to drive. As I was backing out of the garage one day, I accidentally hooked the frame on the car bumper onto her bike and rather than get out of the car to see what was holding it up, I simply gave the car more gas. I still owe her a bike to this day. It was in this garage that my brother Dave and I took apart the engine of an old Pontiac Le Mans Grand Prix that our neighbors gave us. I helped him do a valve and gasket job on the engine. He actually knew what he was doing; I just liked getting dirty. It was in this garage that the old Dodge Plymouth Valiant given to us by our cousins Sam and Rena lived – my Dad loved that car.

I went down the basement and found some of my old high school poetry scribbled in chalk onto a wood panel by the washing machine. There on the wall was the remnant of a Mari Evans poem: “If there be sorrow” was all that was left – the first line of the poem, the rest of the poem was all washed out but I remembered it and I recited to myself it in a dark, moist whisper: “If there be sorrow/Let it be for things/Undone, unachieved, unrealized, unattained/To these add one:/Love withheld, love restrained.”

I went outside and said goodbye to the multi-stemmed Black Birch tree in the back yard. It looked like a hydra with its many thick trunks. The many stems made it ideal for building a tree house and I remember nailing boards of plywood between the trunks, and two-by-four steps climbing high to the top of the tree. I touched the tree and said goodbye to it like it was a person.

Just next to the tree was the concrete patio extension that jutted out from the main patio that my Dad poured when he bought that brick façade barbeque pit. He built it during an era when barbeque pits were the rage. I recalled how as a kid I stood at the other end of the yard and pretended I was pitching for the Mets hurling a heavy sponge ball against the brick backstop of the pit until the brick began to give way and the façade started to crack. The barbeque pit is long gone but the concrete extension is still there, intact and as fresh as when the concrete was first poured.

I went back inside and loaded my car with a few more things. My Mom hadn’t eaten breakfast and it was 10:00AM. She was starting to shake. “Ma,” I said to her, “you’re diabetic!” Then I mouthed the words in an exaggerated deliberateness: “You have to eat!” I drove up to Dunkin Donuts and got her a croissant and cup of coffee. Afterwards, I went outside and finished off the roll of film, then put my camera into the car and walked back in.

She was on the steps again, with that same look: overwhelmed but resigned, uncertain but sure, tired but anxious. I hugged her again and tried to say something wise, offer up some verbal balm that would soothe whatever anxiety or doubts she had. Up to this point, I had been cool, nostalgic, but not really sad. I felt grateful, really, really grateful - for being able to say goodbye to this place, this sacred place in my life that had harbored me all those years. Growing up here had been nothing if not a safe haven. Whatever interior, spiritual life I possessed now as an adult was formulated here, within these walls. Then I felt the lump in my throat and that burning behind the soft of my eyes. I said nothing – I couldn’t - but my Mom did: “We had some good times here, didn’t we?” I wanted to say “yes” but I was crying. I hugged her again, nodded and turned to leave. I got in my car and drove off sobbing past the nicely trimmed Long Island lawns.

As I was composing myself in the car, trying hard not to seem psychotic (now the picture of some man sobbing in his car, alone, would barely raise an eyebrow in New York, I had been living away from New York a long time so naturally I felt self conscious) it suddenly hit me what it was that I was feeling: I was dying. I knew that I would never be back this way again. The friends I had in high school are no longer in this town; they are all over the world now, and now my Mom too would be gone. I had no business being in this neighborhood ever again. I was experiencing grief, not for the loss of some good times or old memories – but the real and actual death of who I was back then. The person I was, the one who grew up in this house, was gone – actually had been gone for some time but now the last tie was severed and it was like mourners throwing their handful of dirt onto a coffin. This was my way of experiencing the death of me as something real, something tangible.

In a way I felt a little relieved. We would be retelling the stories of the old neighborhood on any occasion we could – our family life is built around this sort of story telling. But I was free to feel sad for the loss of who I was back then. The words of the mystic Julian of Norwich suddenly came to mind: “All shall be well, and all shall be well. And in all manner of things, all shall be well.” As I heard these words bubble up from my heart, words that often comforted me, I eased into the loss like a pair of new jeans.

I headed over to the new place where in true Biegner fashion we made (what else?) but a party of the event, moving my Mom’s things into the new house thus opening another chapter, starting yet another story, beginning another epic tale to be told at some later date and time. We worked hard and ordered out for dinner together and got her settled into her new home. Like an old fashioned “barn raising”, we were tired but happy, really happy to be able to be together for something like this. Not everyone can say this. Not everyone has the ability to be together and celebrate the passing and comings of old and new things in their lives.


We do not die once but many, many times over – coward or courageous soul. During these threshold moments when we are afflicted with the blinding clarity of truth, it hits us square between the eyes and we are defenseless to stop it. When we are forced to give up our childhood home it forces us to give up at last our identity of who we thought we once were. Once we accept this identity as the sham that it is – for we are never really who we think we are, anyway - we are free to pass. It is not until we recognize these moments in our lives that we finally understand the freedom of this sort of loss. With just a bit of pain and a bitter hint of melancholy, we can let go as we move on and allow ourselves to grow just a little bit more.

POEM - Hum

Hum the working class Bumble-bee.
Hum the rapid flapping of Chickadees.
Hum the thunder wings of Eagle and Haw.
Hum Tree Frog’s incessant nagging dark.
Hum the Fall that approaches like a stranger asking directions.
Hum the dance that all things do
And hum the spacious stillness too.
Hum the violent wave of clasping Leaf.
Hum the voice I hear when I listen to Who listens
When I do not speak.
Hum wordless adoration of morning’s placental breech and birth.
Hum Living, Life, Dying and Death.
Hum the long linger between everything said.
And hum, hum,
Hum the Breathing and the Breath.

Before Mary Was the Mother of God

Before Mary was the Madonna, she was a little girl. She wore party dresses to parties, played hopscotch with other little girls, braided her hair with her girl friends and whispered secrets about boys she liked. She played with dolls, dressed them up and pretended to take them to schul. She taught them prayers that she, herself, was learning as a little girl, like the blessings before Shabbat and the prayer to say when hanging a mezuzah. She loved to dip her fingers into the clay pot where her Mother stored honey and she loved to sneak sweet licks in between meals, even though she knew she was not supposed to.

Before Mary gave birth to the Son of Man, she dreamed of marrying a kind man, a good man, one who would take care of her, one who would dote on her, a handsome, rugged man who would give her lots of children, girls and boys. She always wanted girls, but never spoke this aloud to anyone for fear of insulting Yahweh. She dreamed of meaningful yet boisterous Seder dinners with this man. She even knew the scent of him as he came home from a long day at work, a scent that reminded her slightly of her father.

Before Mary was a miracle and a mystery, she dreamed of watching her children grow into young adulthood, of watching them marry under the canopy, and eventually giving her lots of grandchildren as she grew old and gray. Before she uttered that fateful “Yes”, accepting unimaginable suffering, she believed that life was hard but good and that her God of Abraham was the sound choice of gods of her day.

Before Mary was persuaded by that angel, she was just a girl who loved to read. She was thoughtful, and looked after Samaritans, tax collectors and synagogue attending Jews alike. She befriended Romans, offering drinks and baked goods whenever she had the chance.

Before she gave away her life, she’d had only one period and thinking this was a sign from Yahweh she believed it a miracle until she learned from her mother, aunts and female cousins that this was the way it was for all women. She was naïve, but God loves the naïve ones - they are so much easier to work with. Then after learning that her “period” was not a miracle at all, and at age thirteen, became pregnant never once having tasted the sweetness of conjugal love. Now pregnant and unmarried she knew she would have to attend community college at night to get her degree, all while taking care of a toddler with a “messiah-complex”. She was aware that she lived in a part of the world and during a time in history where women in this condition were usually stoned to death. She would learn to lay low, to ignore the graffiti spray-painted by the gangs that roamed the streets of Palestine, the ones calling her “SLUT”, the ones who would taunt her with comments about her “bastard kid” who would never amount to anything. They would tell her she was a drain on society, living off Roman welfare, driving the Empire into ruin.

Still, there was a steel-like quality in her love for Jesus and others. Everyone underestimated her: her parents, her friends, her cousins and aunts and uncles. They all told her she should move, to find a man who would marry her before she began to “show”. She refused but even still, she decided to ask Joseph to help because she knew he would. He was her prom date after all and even though he was a jock at school he was a good guy, a reliable guy. He was one of those guys who worked with his hands in woodshop, and always smelled like fresh cedar or dogwood and always had pine shaving in his hair.

Before the pregnancy that defied all logic, before her bloated-ness and tiredness, before her Braxton Hicks contractions, the constant need to pee, the incessant backaches, even before a birth which by modern third world standards seemed primitive and savage – before all those things, Mary was just a little girl who once suckled at her mother’s breasts, who sometimes had nightmares and would run to snuggle next to her Mother as she slept. Once, she was just a little girl who wanted to make a difference by being a mother and giving love.