L’Chaim
I regard it as a failure if a man walks out of here in a straight line.
— Leon Silver (Nelson St. Synagogue)
heads bow eyes close
silence but for your voice
soft against the dark and I am gone
drifting to things far removed from prayer
into the silent cinema of my mind
gone for the length of a long shot
a lazy punting downstream gone
until I’m nothing more
than a fading speck on the water
and the horizon’s painted red gone
until I’m called bobbing back
to the distant tumble of wine
the huddled bodies of clinking glass
incidental yet strangely intimate
and for a second I feel grown-up
standing tall glass in hand
trying my grip around the stem
until I draw it near and tilt
let the sweet taste touch my lips
and trick me with its quickening burn
as it sinks deep inside my gut
I tell myself keep it together
don’t wince cling to your unfazed face
through the many years to come
Strow
i.
My forefathers must have known strow
as the obsolete variant of the verb
to strew, as each Strow rose from the East
and was strewn like seed over North America,
holding down the suffix –man like a straw
hat against the Atlantic’s trading winds.
ii.
I know some of my ancestors by occupation:
milkman, mealman, chapman, bowman, marksman,
doorman, dustman, showman, beadsman, barman,
ataman, yeoman, bondsman, batsman, bogeyman,
boatman; all Strowman, or Strewman, or, in some
cases, an o slipping between the w and the m.
iii.
What to do with something that belongs to you,
but does not belong, something you have carried
with you your whole life, without any fuss, until
now, its weight bobbing like a bindle at the end
of your stick, a grown man’s hand kind of weight,
which you realise, looking back, is your own?
*
James Strowman lives in Paris where he is completing a doctorate in musicology and teaching contemporary Anglophone music and poetry at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Frogmore Papers, The Blue Nib Literary Magazine, and Ink Sweat & Tears.
