On Shabbos, long before GPS, somewhere in the Catskills,
I got lost, blundered down a spur of road called Lovers’ Lane,

where down at the end, beside a ramshackle house,
and a front yard heaped with junk, cast off motorcycles,

teen-age Hasidic boys congressed, wearing their all black,
formal attire, cheap, shiny polyester tailcoats, top hats—

poor boy tuxedos, and beneath their white shirts, were
their poncho-like kartens, from whose four corners

suspended tzitzits, or tassels, to symbolize the cardinal directions.
From both sides of their anemic temples, their payes dangled,

like fusilli,—these boys spun to target me, magnetic
as a compass needle, startled by the strange car coming

down their street. I was an event! A sighting. Rolling down
the window, I asked for help, hesitant, hoping to be understood,

extended the map outside the glass, careful not to touch
the hands of one of the group who approached me like

a bank teller, and took it, called the others over to confer,
and as they came closer, some perhaps curious to peer

inside my old Volvo, but first things first,
in broken English, I was questioned by the leader

as to whether I was Jewish, if so where did I worship.
As if reading Torah they bickered in Yiddish,

pointed their fingers to spots on the map, until they
reached consensus, declared the direction I should go in,

then withdrew from me utterly, their eyes clouded by
another world invisible to me, where they lived.

As I drove off, from my rear- view mirror I could
see that my navigators had already resumed their places,

absolutely certain where they stood, sending me back
exactly where I had come from.

 

Deborah Gorlin is the author of three books of poems, BODILY COURSE, White Pine Poetry Press Prize, 1997; LIFE OF THE GARMENT, winner of the 2014 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize; and OPEN FIRE, Bauhan, 2023. Her work has appeared in a wide range of journals including Poetry; American Poetry Review; Bomb, Best Spiritual Writing 2000, Plume; On the Seawall; the Ekphrastic Review; Mass Poetry: the Hard Work of Hope; The Common; and Yetzirah. Emerita co-director of the Writing Program at Hampshire College, she served for many years as a poetry editor at The Massachusetts Review.