What They Used to Say

-Brain Diamond

 Here is something they used to say
 in Tibova: *When the Rebbe comes*
 *you know there will be trouble*.
 Sometimes gypsies stole all the chickens
 from the marketplace, or cattle disappeared,
 entire fields emptied in the night.

 The Rebbe wears his kaftan open, a small
 bottle tucked away inside his many pockets.
 Little slugs of schnapps to greet winter.
 

He stumbles between houses, cheeks

on fire. The sun has not come out
in twenty days. His great-grandfather,
they say, was the Yismach Moshe,
and now all day he pulls at his ears
complaining about the miserable wind.

*He is no Tzaddik*, the people moan,
though once, it is sworn, he cured
a dying woman with his lips.

Some say she was a gypsy.
Others, the angel of death
come to take the Rebbe back.

She came to him, her face
a collection of bone, yellow
in the room’s thin dust.

He pulled her black hair. Eyes like
the Bal Shem Tov. When he kissed
her forehead, the earth forgot to move.

*The Universe began with black stone*
the Rebbe says, and my great-grandmother
watches from the kitchen

as soldiers march
along the river, waving black
flags, their boots trampling
snow. The light is soft, poplars
weighed down by wind,
the Rebbe’s straining voice.

It is Kol Nidre. People carry their sins
like loaves of bread. The sky
is a thousand pieces of the same color.

Once, when my great-grandmother was a girl
she wandered into the fields
and was lost.

Where she fell asleep
a ring of mushrooms grew
around her.

The Angel of death has one eye
says the Rebbe, a sea
of black hats rise, then fall.

My great-grandmother sits in her room
while men parade to temple,
their voices tangled together.

Lately, she has been worried about the birds
nesting in her roof, how fragile they seem
when winter closes its fist.