Patrons of my Patreon page can head over there for an advance copy of my next column for the Progressive Populist. It’s called “Circular Firing Squads” and offers my take on the Democrats’ internecine squabbles.

My current column, “Election Day Diary: Dark Mood for a Dark Moment,” is available at Progressive Populist.

I posted this to a now dormant tumblr several years ago after I happened upon Rachel Sherwood’s poems on Poets.org. I’ve since reached out to her friend and literary executor David Trinidad, who kindly passed along a pdf of Mysteries of Afternoon and Evening, her lone book. This is a short essay, a first impression. A longer essay is brewing.

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Discovering Rachel Sherwood

She was barely 25 when she died, author of stray poems published in small journals, and like too many great poets, her Work faded to memory. Reading Rachel Sherwood today on the Poetry Foundation website (her lone book is out of print and difficult to find), I marvel at her control of language and grasp of detail. Marvel at the power of her fragmentary poems. At a voice surprisingly mature for such a young writer.

There is pain. A poem like “The Usual” reeks of it, opening with a conversational declaration  — “This is what it’s like” — before shifting into second person and, without narrative, dropping the emotional hammer.

you sit in the white room

singular, knees together

arms over your head

Helpless. Prone. Arms in a protective position. Three lines. Nothing wasted. The speaker, in her vulnerability, is disconnected from truth. Trust has been erased. She guards herself against “the noise from the radio,” calling it “false as a drunk’s promise / to loan you his car next week.” It’s a nod to a seamier, unreliable world — and she refuses to flinch. “Of course,” she says, echoing the first line’s straightforward declaration, making it clear she’s seen all of this before, “next week never comes / lies continue, nobody disbelieves them / but some are ready for the real story.” The exclusion of punctuation forces it all to run together, while also slowing the pace.

The real story is that “the young man involved breaks her tired heart.” Tired. Resigned: “it’s the usual: spilt liquor, / broken dishes, wrecked cars.”

The title poem of her lone collection, “Mysteries of Afternoon and Evening,” relies on some of the same techniques: opening declaration, an accumulation of small details. And like all of her work (There are a dozen poems by Sherwood at the Poetry Foundation website), the word choices are made with purpose. A “fitful” wind, so ominous, does its damage: “soot piles in the corners / of new buildings. It is “soot,” the burned residue of energy, and not just “dirt”; and it is “new buildings,” indicating that even the gleaming edifices of progress are to be sullied. Even the gulls — an ocean bird — are victimized. They “stumble out of place” — not walk — and are joined children who “watch, breathless” and “feel an emanation / from this shuddering place.”

There is a sense of magic within all of this. A winter sky that “cracks with cardinal color,” a “wonder”that causes the speaker and her companion to coo “like dwarves at the Venetian court / must have done — / amazed at Tiepolo’s sunshot ceilings.”

This is where the poem resides, in “fickle” wonder, in an acknowledged “smaller inconstancy.” Change. Uncertainty. “But,” she says, “the dazzle above, enclosing / seems fit or made for this / fragment of belief.”

Sherwood was writing 40 years ago, but her work feels contemporary, a comment on the current moment. Perhaps, we have not advanced as much as we seem to think, despite out cell phones and gadgets. We still witness the cruelties man imposes on man. We still suffer the greed and vanities of fools who think they are — we are — somehow exempt from the wind’s fitful power.

At our best, we acknowledge, we sit amazed, by the mysteries. At our worst, we allow the meanness to overtake us. Both are present, always.

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I came across Rachel Sherwood’s Work for the first time earlier this week as I was catching up on some podcasts. I was immediately struck by her poem, “The Usual,” and looked her up on the Poetry Foundation website. I’d wondered how her Work escaped me — the poems were as real as anything I’ve come across.

The story, at least what there is of it, is sad and can seem typical of the arts. A great talent begins her emergence, but tragedy strikes and the talent is lost. Sherwood died in a car crash in 1979 at the age of 25.

She had

attended St. David’s University College in Wales and California State University Northridge, where she cofounded the literary journal Angel’s Flight and where her poem ‘Mysteries of Afternoon and Evening’ won the Academy of American Poets prize. She also worked on the editorial staffs of 1822 and The Wallace Stevens Journal.

She had published poems in Angel’s Flight, Beyond Baroque, and Foreign Exchange, and had given several poetry readings in the Los Angeles area. To preserve Sherwood’s memory, her friends established the Rachel Sherwood Poetry Prize at Northridge; the award is given annually to a student poet. David Trinidad also created Sherwood Press in her honor and published (in collaboration with Greg Boyd’s Yarmouth Press) a book of Rachel Sherwood’s poems, Mysteries of Afternoon and Evening (1981).

This is from the Poetry Foundation website and leaves out her cause of death (found on Wikipedia, not the most reliable of sources). It’s unclear why, but poetry.org can’t be faulted. They host a dozen of her poems on their site, which amounts to a necessary act of preservation. Her book, Mysteries of Afternoon and Evening,  was published in 1981 by Sherwood Press and Yarmouth Press, but is out of print. But for the Poetry Foundation — and her friend David Trinidad — she’d be completely lost to us.

Originally posted to my Patreon page.

Nearly 100 New Jersey inmates were released into federal immigration custody during a release that was supposed to be part a humanitarian prison amnesty program designed to stop the spread of COVID-19 in state prisons.

The release, reported by NJ.com and also relayed to me by advocates for the state’s immigrant communities, has further damaged the relationship between the immigrant community and government officials, with many immigrants fearing they could be picked up by immigration enforcement or be turned over to federal authorities just for shopping at the local Walmart or getting a COVID test.

The Rev. Bolivar Flores, vice president of the New Jersey Coalition of Latino Pastors and Ministers, was closed to tears as he recounted a call from a member of his church, Ministerio El Sol Sale Para Todas Internacional in Jersey City.

“I received a call from a mother who have two children, 4 and 3 years old, say that she doesn’t have no more milk, and she’s scared to go to the Walmart, to get for a child who is hungry milk, because she see where she lives and that her husband may be arrested,” Flores said.

Flores said most undocumented residents pay taxes to the state and federal government through a tax identification number, and that they do so happily and willingly because they want to be part of the community. 

“But now people don’t want to go to do COVID testing, because they don’t trust our state,” he said. “They see this and say, ‘I don’t want to go to have COVID testing. I don’t have green card. When he asks me (for it), he can do what happened with my brother who just got out from jail.”

His story reminded me of the fears expressed by immigrants I interviewed in New Brunswick in 2016, during the final year of the Obama administration when immigration agencies engaged in a surge of enforcement and detention. What’s different this time is that the enforcement action took advantage of a humanitarian effort by the state, which released more than 2,000 inmates from state prison Nov. 5. The program, created by the state Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Phil Murphy, was meant “to reduce the spread of the coronavirus in corrections facilities.” The program, as NJ Spotlight reports, was coordinated with local and county officials.

According to NJ.com, 95 immigrant inmates were “released ahead of schedule Wednesday” and “were picked up by federal immigration officers.” Advocates for immigrants said the inmates were green card holders, which means they were authorized to be in the United States, but that their status was contingent on their not committing criminal offenses.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office of Enforcement and Removal Operations said in an email that 88 inmates (yes, there is a discrepancy) were detained by ICE on ICE detainers. (The same email was sent to NJ.com, apparently.) They were “violent offenders or have convictions for serious crimes such as homicide, Aggravated Assault, drug trafficking and child sexual exploitation. Some were placed in removal proceedings and housed in ICE facilities outside of NJ, while others were detained locally pending execution of their final orders of removal.”

ICE said that 53 were sent to Texas, one to upstate New York, and 32 were detained in ICE custody in New Jersey at one of four facilities that hold immigrant detainees. Two “were released under an Order of Supervision in NJ based on case specific circumstances,” the email said.

Advocates dispute ICE’s characterization of the those detained, pointing to the law’s language. The legislation signed into law by Gov. Phil Murphy in October (S2519) specifically prohibits early release of inmates serving sentences for murder, aggravated assault, or “conduct … characterized by a pattern of repetitive, compulsive behavior.”

And they found the actions heartless. Activists tell me families were waiting outside state prisons for their family members, when ICE swooped in and whisked them away.

“To watch children waiting for their parents, and can you just imagine that their parents had just walked out, and now to see them be imprisoned,” Flores tells me, “this is a perverse and diabolical act.”

The federal effort is consistent with a decades-long punitive approach to immigration that has forced too many in the immigrant community to remain in the shadows rather than come forward and participate fully in the communities in which they live. This creates a dangerous atmosphere. Many fear contacting police to report crimes, fear getting medical help, fear even the smallest of interactions with government agencies. The coronavirus pandemic has only exacerbated these fears, which predate Donald Trump and likely will continue after Trump has left office.

What is different is not the deportations — Obama set a record for that — but the broader narrative around immigrants and the aggressive way in which Trump’s immigration agencies have been deployed as shock troops has heightened the danger for immigrant communities. Trump and his Homeland Security secretaries have used hardline anti-immigration rhetoric at every turn, including portraying all immigrant detainees as dangerous criminals.

There also is a retributive component, say many activists, with the Trump administration through ICE and the Border Patrol ramping up enforcement in Democratic communities and states as revenge for those areas not supporting the administration’s punitive policies.

“I see, in the middle of the campaign, that our state is a Democratic state, that we want to take this guy from the White House, and this is the reparation that we have, the reaction from the White House,” Flores said. I think so our elected official of the federal level.

What happened in New Jersey is consistent with the separation of children from their families at the border, with the criminalization of humanitarian aid at the border, with the expanded use of ICE and the BPS far from the border, with the rounding up of immigrants when they appear at local and regional courts, and the efforts to defund sanctuary cities and invade sanctuary churches to root out refugees and unauthorized immigrants.

The immigration system is broken and has been for decades. It needs a complete makeover that recognizes the damage American foreign interference has done in Central and South America, the creation of failed states tied to our aggressive anti-communist efforts dating back the 1950s, and the ravaging of the environment by rich countries. The uncertainty and chaos, especially in the Northern Triangle in Central America, are on our hands. We can’t pretend otherwise. Any reformation of our immigration system has to recognize this.

Chris Stapleton’s new record, Starting Over, is flawless, a master class in songwriting. He is deft with the rhyme and is expert at turning a phrase and making the cliched tropes of country songs feel both fresh and like your favorite sneakers.

His band is tight, the production crisp (strings on “Cold” set a mood that the guitar solo slices into — brilliant). It all lends muscle to one of the best and most muscular voices in contemporary music.

He is on par with Willie Nelson and  Merle Haggard.

“Therefore are we bound to give thanks, to praise, to glorify, to honor, to exalt, to extol, and to bless him who wrought all these wonders for our fathers and for us.” — The Mishnah (qtd. in The Passover Haggadah, edited by Nahum Glatzer)

It is still difficult to hear him cry.

I write the sentence, then pause. Unsure. Overcome. I want to continue, to explain what this sentence means, to be rational, to place this moment in context. I can’t. And yet, here I am, putting words on paper (or, more accurately, typing words on a screen), setting word after word, sentence after sentence.

It is still difficult to hear my dad cry.

We talked on the phone last night. He had attended a small Seder, just he and two friends down the street. I know I should tell him it was not a good idea, that it violates the protocols most of us are attempting to follow as the coronavirus spreads like weeds across the nation.

Dad will be 82 next month. His friends are a husband and wife in their 70s. She has MS and uses a wheelchair. He has had some respiratory issues in recent years. My dad has kidney issues and suffered an embolism that placed him the hospital a year and a half ago. They should be isolating themselves. But how can I tell him to stay home when staying at home is breaking his spirit?

He’s being safe, for the most part. His neighbor gave him a mask and my sister was mailing him some additional face coverings. He’s limiting his visits to stores. His neighbors have helped — they are putting in bulk orders for several households at places like Costco and Walmart, then doing curbside pickup. This is smart and keeps them from having to wander the aisles and use grocery carts used by dozens of others. He has a good two-plus weeks worth of food and supplies, maybe more.

He is by himself. My siblings and I are the only real contact he has with the outside world, aside from the occasional conversation from a distance with his neighbors and an occasional call from friends. I talk to him two, sometimes three times a day. We have the same conversation each day: “Same shit,” he’ll say, and then describe what he ate, his bathroom habits, maybe broach the subject of politics and the news. He watches Fox. I don’t. He voted for Trump. I didn’t. There is almost nothing on which we agree, so I have to engage in a kind of verbal jujitsu to move the conversation to something else. There are no sports, because of the virus, which makes it harder. Sports have always been our connection, especially basketball — some of the most vivid memories I have, the best memories, are of driving home from Madison Square Garden after a Knicks or Rangers game, me rifling through the Knick media guide and tossing out random details about players.

“University of San Francisco, 6-foot-7,” I’d say.

“Mike Farmer,” he’d respond. He never missed a player.

The virus has taken away his primary passion, bowling, which is something he’s been doing for probably 70 years. He’s not as good as he once was — who at 81 can say they are. And he once was remarkable — perfect games and 800 series. Bowling, though, was more than just competition for him. It was his social life, as well, the place where he’d connect with his friends. It was something he did with my mom, as well, which also makes it pregnant with emotion.

It is seven months to the day as I write this that she moved into the memory care facility. There was little choice — she was barely lucid and had become difficult to handle. She would get obsessed with the Tupperware, blame imaginary people for coming into the house and moving things and stealing. She would fly into rages that had nothing to do with the world the rest of us occupied. And dad could not handle her. She is doing well now, but he has been in mourning, racked with guilt, lonely. He talked with her yesterday, and she was in a good space — even seemed to know who she was talking with, which was not the case the last time, when he FaceTimed with her. He says he’s past his guilt, but I think he’s rationalizing, and that’s OK. He’s earned the right to cope with this however he can and my siblings and I have a responsibility to listen,

I told him a couple of weeks ago, when he was feeling guilty about “infringing on our lives,” that he’d been there for us and now it was our turn. He laughed and then got weepy. So did I.

He called me last night when he got home from the Seder. He said it was a good time and he only left because he forgot his pills. He would have stayed longer. It made me smile. He said he started crying a couple of times when he was there, as they talked, and it made sense. He was with a couple, something he couldn’t be any longer, and it was Passover, which holds such deep importance for him. He said they had Haggadahs and did the first half of the service. That had become our approach before he and mom moved to Las Vegas in 1995. Twenty-five years. Distance makes all of this more difficult — even before the enforced isolation brought on by COVID-19 (an 11th plague?).

They took turns reading from the Haggadah, he tells me, and I ask if he read with the same speed as when I was a kid. He said he used to read it in Hebrew. That was how his father did it. In our house, though, the Seder was in English and dad raced through, as though the Egyptians were hot on our tail and he needed to finish before we were captured. As my siblings and I got older, we’d take turns but we were never quite fast enough for him. I think he did that for my mom, who was far more interested in getting the meal started than recounting the story of Jews in Egypt.

Mom. That’s why he cried last night. It was the first time in their almost 60 years of marriage that they were not together for Passover. They weren’t together for Rosh Hashana, for Yom Kippur, Sukkoth, or Hanukkah, either. But Passover more than the others is a family holiday. More than the others, it is about identity and connectedness, about remembering a shared past and a shared history. It has not been transformed like Hanukkah, an otherwise minor holiday made central by its proximity to Christmas, into a commercial extravaganza. It is a holiday that, in many ways, recalls events that Franz Rosenzweig describes as the “welding of people into a people” (The Passover Haggadah, p. xx) and that Adin Steinsaltz describes as the “most important religious family casino of the year” (p. 123). The Seder story — a recounting of the book of Exodus interspersed with rabbinical interpretations and debates — is a story of deliverance and unity, but also of doubt. The Jewish people flee repression in Egypt as a people, but also waver, lulled into rebellion against Moses as the Egyptian army closed in. Moses descended from Sinai, smashes the first tablets of the Ten Commandments and destroys the idolators and rebels and a people is born.

We all take different things from this story. The religious view this as proof of god — embedded in the story, the moral of the tale, is that the wicked will pay, and that the devout will prosper. For someone like me, an agnostic who still describes himself very much as a Jew, the doubt is most important, because it reminds me that there are things out there that we cannot know. Kierkegaard talks of making the leap of faith, of making the declaration of belief, as a singularly human act because man then moves beyond his doubt without relinquishing it. I remain at the precipice, unready to leap, full of a doubt that runs both toward belief and away from it.

I can hear a similar doubt in my dad’s voice, a sense of helplessness, a quiet flailing at the injustice of aging, of Alzheimer’s, of the coronavirus that he would never put into words. He remains observant, even if he has left many of the rituals behind. Doubt hovers above everything for him now, questions about how long he has and what that even means, about how he can maintain the most important relationship of his life even as his partner recedes into a new and different reality, one he cannot inhabit.

Above my desk are numerous framed black-and-whites: a company photo depicting my great uncle’s news distribution business (Kalet News Co.), a grainy shot of a somber great grandfather, and a half dozen wedding photos — my dad’s parents, my mom’s, Annie’s parents, ours. Everyone is so young, full of a sense of where things might lead. 

My parent’s wedding picture is among them. It shows two smiling kids — dad was 24 and mom 22. That was 60 years ago. Their’s was a promise fulfilled, but it is a promise that has grown difficult to maintain.

When I was a kid, I spent most weekend mornings in the spring and summer with my dad, watching him play softball, which he did for probably 30-plus years. At first, I would just go with him to the games in Rockaway Beach, then at the Dumps in South Brunswick after we moved. It was a kind of hero worship that was destined to fade, as it must, as the son grows into a man.

There is a passage in Philip Roth’s facts, his first stylized effort at autobiography, that stays with me. He writes of “naively believ(ing) as a child that I would always have a father present,” of the father commanding “my attention by his bulging biceps and his moral structures” (16-17). This is the father I remember from the softball fields, the one who could pull the ball over the right field fence or poke a base hit the other way almost at will. He was strong and powerful, and had remained so even as he aged. I was always the little kid looking up at the powerful man. Somewhere along the way, however, things began to shift. As Roth wrote about his father, mine “is no longer the biggest man I have to contend with — and when I am not all that far from being an old man myself — I am able to laugh at his jokes and hold his hand and concern myself with his well-being.”

I’m able to love him the way I wanted to when I was sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen but when, what with dealing with him and feeling at odds with him, it was simply an impossibility. The impossibility, for all that I always respected him for his particular burden and his struggle within a system that he didn’t choose.

Roth talks of the “mythological role of a Jewish boy growing up in a family like mine,” growing up as the oldest son, which Roth wasn’t, was to rise higher than he had. Each generation is supposed to achieve more, to be more than the previous one. Roth frames this as a particularly Jewish myth, but I think it transcends religion and ethnicity and race. This notion is a tenet of the American dream, and it is can be stifling.

As I write in another essay, I rebelled against it. Like Roth, I think I found ways to be at odds with my father. And I think I’ve achieved something for myself, though not necessarily what he might have envisioned, and we have had our moments of strife. And I can admit that it was only when I’d stopped seeking his approval that I found peace with myself and the approval I craved, though his image continued to be outsized in my mind — at least until a nasty fight that left him deflated and me shaking.

We’d fought before, but not like this. The stakes were high. My mom had become unmanageable, and I had grown frustrated with his seeming unwillingness to acknowledge that life was changing. He could not adjust as her Alzheimer’s robbed her not just of her memory but of her ability to perform the basic tasks he had come to expect from her in their old-fashioned, patriarchal relationship. He managed the money, all of the economic and decisions, did the “man” stuff. He took care of her in that way, while she took care of him and the house by cooking, cleaning, and so on. There’s was the ‘50s-‘60s marriage, and I don’t think they ever questioned the dynamic. There is a feminist critique of this, which I agree with, but that is not relevant here. They were always close, and only grew closer as they grew older, and for the last 25 years they were rarely apart.

It was August of 2019 and I flew out, because he asked me to. He was struggling to cope, and it was time to consider other options. We looked at a couple of facilities, considered bringing someone in, and I’m not sure I was anymore ready than he was to do what ultimately had to be done.

He was hemming and hawing, worrying about finances, saying he was done with it, angry that she would go off at the slightest thing. “I don’t have to take this,” he yelled, after she criticized him or accused him of something. I lost my temper, started screaming, said a lot of things that needed to be said. And as we yelled, he sat in his easy chair in his little office room, sinking into the cushions, shrinking before my eyes. I’d never seen him like this before. He was deflated. Defeated.

I shifted my tone and we continued talking, finally coming to an agreement, an understanding, an admission on my part of what he was dealing with and realization on his part that he had no choice but to adapt, to change. Things could not be as they had been — not for him and my mother nor, as I now understand, for my dad and me. This is a good thing. It is important to see one’s parents as human beings and not as gods. But it does not make this new reality any easier to accept.

I know I’m lucky. We still have him with us, even if he is on the other side of the country. He couldn’t say this about his father. I try to infuse this sense of gratefulness into each of our conversations, though it is difficult. I try to be as present as I can in these twice-daily calls, but I know my attention drifts, to the television, the computer screen, and then I feel guilty.

And sometimes, I want to cry and I come close. Especially when he cries. Especially when the chill of the physical distance, of the isolation imposed by the coronavirus, when the reality that our time here is finite gets into my bones.

Still, it hurts to hear him cry.