POEM: Memories of My Father

(Originally published in 2021)

In honor of the eighth yahrtzeit of my father, Dr. Moshe Anisfeld, Moshe Shmuel ben Shimon Tuvia HaLevi, z”l

Velour leisure-suit pants 
pulled high over an Oxford
button down shirt,
short crooked stature
belied by a face alive 
with twinkle and light,
he sits at the kitchen table
nursing hot water with lemon
in a preheated glass
and serious brown bread with 
a cottage cheese-radish canopy,
or stands on his head
legs against the wall
after years of disciplined
late life yoga practice,
never losing the 
Yiddish-Polish-Russian-
Israeli accent in his 
perfect quirky English:
“furunkel” and “rucksack.”
Some brokenness hides behind
the anger and we know 
there’s no arguing with authority, 
which at other times 
turns warm as the sun, 
loving us and the brilliance 
of infants and syntactic ambiguity: 
“The police were ordered 
to stop drinking at midnight.”
Never missed a night
counting the Omer
through an oxygen tube 
or making havdooleh
on his last day here, 
but Friday night Maariv
was “each person 
at their own pace” 
and his pace was elsewhere.
A self-felt marginal man
who became the center
of any room, blue sparkly
eyes that saw and felt
and knew and connected
without the words he
loved to play with.

I used to think we each 
took a piece of the legacy,
divided up like booty —
Psychology, Agnon, Rashi —
but I’ve been hushed 
by the impossibility 
of defining a life.

You sat with us
so quietly at the end.

I sense you still.