A Literary Magazine in Support of the Jewish Community
On Reading That According to the Jewish Calendar, Days Begin with Night
by Susan Aizenberg
On Reading That According to the Jewish Calendar, Days Begin with Night
I think of my mother’s Coconut Creek buddies,
all in their late eighties, clustered
around the condo pool in their floppy hats
and flowery one-piece suits
like so many withered blossoms. Getting old ain’t for sissies,
they liked to warn. Meaning the obituaries
they scanned each morning on their sun-wrecked
lanais over bagels and decaf—Who do we know?
Who’s younger? Older? Meaning the blue and white
ambulances, ubiquitous as the surrey-fringed
golf carts prowling their Planned Community,
screaming harbingers among the rapacious
tropical blooms and subdued fake lawns. Meaning
walkers, nurses, and companions from the islands.
Meaning hip fractures, glaucoma. Tumors. Each new
day not a beginning, but one day less. At sixty-nine,
you and I are babies, they scoff, but hasn’t it begun?
This one surprises his wife with new hearing aids
in lieu of birthday roses. That one’s darling needs
new medications for his fragile heart. Gray hair,
less hair, lost reading glasses. Vanity’s the least of it.
Making love’s acrobatic, but not in some up-
against-the-elevator-wall Cinemax way. And of course,
it’s an illusion, and no work for the sun, what we call
its rising and setting, as we turn and turn, passing
in and out of its light. Night doesn’t fall,
day does not break. It’s this fragile earth, endlessly
circling and spinning, that we should pity.
Susan Aizenberg
Susan Aizenberg’s newest collection, A Walk with Frank O’Hara and Other Poems, is forthcoming in 2024 in the University of New Mexico Press’s Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series. She is the author as well of two earlier full-length collections, Quiet City (BkMk 2015) and Muse (Crab Orchard 2002) and of a limited-edition letterpress chapbook, First Light (Gibraltar 2020). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Plume, On the Seawall, North American Review, American Journal of Poetry, Blackbird, The Night Heron Barks, I70, and elsewhere. Her awards include the VCU Levis Prize and the Nebraska Book Award for Poetry. Aizenberg lives and writes in Iowa City. Her website is https://susanaizenberg.wordpress.com.
