My Dark, Semitic Wiles
I took my dark, Semitic wiles on the road.
The train was empty and that was lovely,
everywhere an open space. En route to Berlin,
I held the bathroom mirror and spoke
to my mother, foreign leaves of foreign trees
and the conductor’s garbled nothings
blurred above my head. She thinks I’m going
to get myself killed. Lost forever. I remember
a straight-haired little girl at the kindergarten
table with eyeglasses as petite as her pink
Polly Pocket. I crushed them in my fat hand,
arranged the lozenge lenses next to the legs,
purple plastic bird femurs. Like chicken,
I picked it apart. My fellow passengers,
the unwed Jewess rides among you, come
to tour your capital of tragedy. Love me
out of guilt like an unborn sister, a mother’s
final scowl before death, the very nose
on your face you’d hack off just to belong.
| Nicole Steinberg |
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levelheaded: My Dark, Semitic Wiles
In the poem’s title, and again in its first line, the speaker identifies herself in three ways—as one who schemes, and as one whose ploys are dark and Semitic. At first, these self-identifiers seem entirely serious.
We get a more nuanced idea of who this speaker is when we she recalls that the empty train—a train filled with possibility and free of limiting identifiers— was “lovely.” A line later, when we learn that the train was “En route to Berlin,” in rush the historical and cultural associations that limit those lovely possibilities.
By looking into a mirror and speaking to her mother, the speaker identifies with her ancestors. At the same time, the “foreign leaves of foreign trees / and the conductor’s garbled nothings” illustrate that she is not of the same place as her forbears.
The narrator’s mother worries for her (“She thinks I’m going / to get myself killed.”), but the woman who once took a classmate’s glasses and “crushed them in [her] fat hand,” can probably look out for herself physically. More importantly, what the poem expresses is the speaker’s emotional vulnerability, her need for a solution to the devastating possibility of feeling “Lost forever.”
Of course, with the mention of Polly Pocket and her self-proclamation as “the unwed Jewess [who] rides among you,” the speaker of this poem also has a sense of humor. But clinging to the comedy is the idea that we are touring the speaker’s own “capital of tragedy,” where the desire to be loved is so palpable that one would alter her physical appearance or cut ties with her heritage “just to belong.”
– The Editors
