Marrying America: a Jew in Exile

By Melvin Wilk

Wilk is a poet not only of the utmost competence but brilliance. Here is a poet able to give mature voice to the oldest and most enduring American theme: the immigrant as spiritual pilgrim. The clarity of the pilgrim voice is the admirable center of Wilks bookas if a straight-speaking Brooklynite has been hot-wired to the mysteries at the heart of the American experience. Its a compelling voice, rising at times out of violence yet the tone it takes is often of lyric tendernessa tenderness so rare in modern poetry it cause you to sit up straight.

Larry Woiwode


Wilk maps new territory of the heart and the Heartland. Thats why his poetry is such a marriage with America, when divorce is impossible.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781514422755

Melvin Wilk

Born in 1939, Melvin Wilk grew up in Brooklyn, New York; attended The High School of Music and Art in Manhattan and Queen’s College; and received a BA from the University of Montana. He earned an MA in English from Boston University, an MA in Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts/Amherst. He taught at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa for 28 years and was awarded the prestigious Professor of the Year award the year he retired. He has published a book of poetry, In Exile (Bookmark Press, University of Missouri), and a scholarly book, The Jewish Presence in T.S. Eliot and Franz Kafka (Brown University). He published many poems in several different journals, including The New Yorker and Poetry. He and his wife of 45 years raised three children. He died in 2012.

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 by Melvin Wilk.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2015918137

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5144-2277-9

                Softcover        978-1-5144-2276-2

                eBook            978-1-5144-2275-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 10/30/2015

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Contents

I.

A TOUR OF THE COUNTRY

Coney Island

Eviction

A Summer In Pine Bush

Low Grades

Rattlesnake Country

Elpenor

Capital City

Sinatra In Des Moines

Horses In Winter

In Chicago

Hiking On The North Shore

The Moon On A Lake In Minnesota

The Plaza In Santa Fe

Tsankawi

Residents In Vegas

Firefighters

Missoula On Saturday Night

Coastal Range

Local Copy

Porn Of Plenty

Things Are Looking Up

II.

REACHING LUNINIEC

Mornings On The Air At Ten

Home Front

A Change Of Address

Governor Bradford, Dorothy May And History

Connections

Stained Glass

Saturday Afternoon At Livingston Manor

Haircut

A Trip An Die Berge

Friday Evening Prayers: Creston, Iowa

At My Grandfather’s Grave

The Distant Town Of Luniniec

III.

A WEDDING STORY

Taken From Life

Mission Orange

Trouble With My Father’s Heart

On First Reading A. E. Housman

Family Worship

October Twenty-Second

Death Benefits

Fathers And Zoos

A Wedding Story

IV.

MARRYING AMERICA

Prairie Landscape

Bright Salvage

Watching And Waiting

Hospice Visit

Signs On The Way

Learning Spanish: Level One

Rainy Season In Tepoztlan

The Tree And Roses

Dancing

Getting Sent

Sex After Sixty

Marriage In Bed

Looking Out, Looking In

Saving Life

Marrying America—The Settling In

Marrying America—A Balancing Act

V.

Selections from IN EXILE

In Brownsville

Finishing The House

I Think Of Dancing

Elijah’s Visit To The Statue Of Liberty

Dropping Out

Flight

Reading In Bed

Hart Crane

Househusband

Too Late

Breaking The Ice

When Divorce Isn’t Possible

American Jewish Biography

Pilgrim Father

Blessing

My Name

Dining Out

My Father’s Cars

Yahrzeit

Learning To Speak

Our Contemporary

Torah

Beginners

Lost In Translation

A Lullaby For My Daughter

In The Zoo After The War

Suburban Nocturne

Distance Running

Riding Home

VI.

NEW POEMS

Genius

The Lost Mother

Elegy For Toni

Lake Company

Berry Picking

September Song

Hummingbirds

Living Close To The Line

Not Skin Deep

Listening To Proust

Friday After Work

Hydrants

Consuming Passion

To A Young Girl Who Lost The Words

Night Flight

Autumn Arrives

At The New Year

Bright And Early

What Remedy?

Higher Learning

Jesus, The Jew

Heavy Boots

Making Notes

Wager

Keeping The Faith

Grass

Living In Spring

Night And Day In Southwest Iowa

Passover

Weather Report

Card From The Vineyard

A Gathering Of Hasidim

How I Met My Wife

For my wife, Mary Beth,

And for my children

Sarah, Joseph, and Gabriel

Is there any better way to tell you about a man than by showing you his poem?

Meyer Liben, Justice Hunger

Marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come, supporting them in this insecure world and even guiding them a little as well, is, I am convinced, the utmost a human being can succeed in doing at all.

Franz Kafka, Letter to his Father

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Some poems first appeared (several in different versions, or with different titles) in the following publications:

The American Scholar, Rattlesnake Country

Brilliant Corners, Sinatra at Eighty in Des Moines

Cityview, "Capital City"

European Judaism, A Change of Address (Resettlement in New York)

The Massachusetts Review, Breaking the Ice, Things Are Looking Up, The Distant Town of Luniniec

Mickle Street Review, Firefighters

Midstream, Friday Evening Prayers, Creston, Iowa "Shoah Literature Connections"

MSS, Eviction

New Virginia Review, Marrying America

North American Review, Mission Orange, Night Flight

The New Yorker," A Wedding Story"

Poetry, Mornings on the Air at Ten

A Wedding Story is anthologized in To Woo and To Wed, ed. Michael Blumenthal, Poseidon, 1992.

Most of the poems in the section In Exile were published in different versions in In Exile, BkMk Press, University of Missouri-Kansas City, 1979. 55 pp.

Melvin Wilk published a scholarly work, Jewish Presence in T. S. Eliot and Franz Kafka, Brown Judaic Studies, Scholars Press, 1986. 217 pp.

These poems have been gathered and arranged by Melvin Wilk’s widow, Mary Beth, with the expert and thoughtful help of Lloyd J. Miller

I.

A TOUR OF THE COUNTRY

CONEY ISLAND

On green billows flecked with spray

out beyond the breakers

in the arms of the sea in the heat of the day

I float, up to my lips in life.

Head to shore, I wear the crowd on the beach like a crown;

turned round, I see them cavort on their vast soundless stage,

my ears filled with shell language.

Sodden grapes pickling in the brine

bob at my ankle as I head for land,

one foot cooled by water, the other sunk in sand.

The beached cries mix

with the hiss of uncanny hints

surging at our common Brooklyn feet,

so removed from Manhattan and the rest of the unseen world.

EVICTION

The family stood out on the street

with no visible support,

the way a dried-out bunch of flowers sometimes lands upright,

ditched when the good time is over.

So these five stuck together on the tenement stoop.

The man in dark dress trousers and a white short-sleeved shirt,

the woman in blue with gloves,

each holding a child by the hand,

each child in a shirt like his father’s,

a girl of twelve aloof, as if loitering,

the yellow strap of her pinafore drooping from a thin shoulder.

They might have been staring at a camera.

In fact, the dry eyes of this bouquet were set

on the bulging bundles of bedding

on the stuffed chair on