"Name Change," a poem from my book of poems, Dwelling

This is the plaque in entry of my grandfather's, Robert Barnstone's, jewelry
and watch store in Lewiston, Maine.

Because in this election, a religious group is being demonized, I offer this family history from my new book of poems, Dwelling. Our family name was changed in 1912, one year before the Leo Frank case. Maine's nativists evolved into the KKK, which in this northern state directed its hate and violence toward Catholics and Jews (because they were regarded as recent immigrants), as well as its few African-American residents. I thought when I was growing up that my grandfather wanted to change the family name because he was ambitious and wanted to be respectable—and I'm sure those considerations figured into his reasoning—yet there was also a back-history of dangerous anti-Semitism. You can read more about anti-Semitism in Maine here, at Documenting Maine Jewry.

Name Change

It was my grandfather’s idea to change

the family name from Bornstein,

meaning amber

          or burning stone in German,

to Barnstone, also meaning amber.

In 1912, he, his father, step-mother,

and all his siblings stood before a judge

in Auburn, Maine,

              and Anglicized the vowels

within their name’s consonants to conceal

being Jews within their souls and behind the walls

of home

(shades drawn to hide Shabbat candlelight.)    

The gems’s classical name was electron,

“beaming sun,” yet the Heliades grief

made them poplars and their tears golden amber. 

                          

Two centuries before, the Emperor

Joseph the Second decreed that all Jews

immediately abandon

                                  Hebrew names

and adopt a constant German surname.

Tax them and keep track of them like the rest

of Christendom,

                          except keep the Jews humble.

No Jew may take the surname of a noble

or renowned family.

                                No Jew may keep

a name if someone complains it was his.

All circumcision books and all birth books

will be in German forever and ever.

The Jews will be registered, just as Jesus

was born in Bethlehem,

                        city of David,

where Joseph and Mary traveled to sign

the census decreed by Caesar Augustus.

Did the ancestors know the parallel—

register to be taxed (and rounded up later)—

when they chose lovely names: apple or pear

tree, rose, gold leaf, green field, or blooming valley.

My jeweler Zaide was a great magician

with diamonds, so I am told.

                                 What if

in 1788, our ancestors

had been able to afford Diamond—

the hardest stone, dispersing spectral color—

would my grandfather have heard the brilliant name

as Jewish?

   and would he have chosen for us

Davies, Day, or even plain Smith instead?

Every time I look down at my left hand,

I behold

  the ring he gave my grandmother:

a platinum setting shaping a sun.

The diamond conceals

                                    fire within

until, awakened by rays, it bursts

into rainbows and stars scattered on the walls

all around me:

           the covenant with Noah:

God will never annihilate us again.

My grandmother, Dora Lempert Barnstone, and my grandfather, Robert Carl Barnstone

My uncle, Howard Barnstone, grandmother, Dora Lempert Barnstone, my
aunt, Beatrice Barnstone Kammerman, and the litte one in front
is my father, Willis Barnstone.

My grandmother, Dora Lempert Barnstone, and her sister, my great Aunt Jane, Jennie Lempert Lichter.

Dwelling on Amazon.Com

And Hope That My Dreams Will Come True

The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams comes from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire.

—Adrienne Rich

When I spent the night with Abigail, back in the ‘60s, we slept in her double bed under a pile of quilts—summer nights were chilly in Vermont. Her bedroom under the eaves had slanting ceilings, just like mine. I don’t think she ever got see my room when we were children because her mother wouldn’t allow her to spend the night at my house. Her mother and my parents were close, dear friends, and she must have known that they would protect Abigail as one of their own. But sadly her mom held fast to the fear that some harm would come to her youngest daughter if she left her side.

After supper, we ran upstairs to her room, and we became free travelers. Nestled together with our cold noses almost touching, we whispered late into the night. Just as we drifted into sleep, Abigail instructed me in dream-making. “If we concentrate hard enough, and only let ourselves think of the dream we want, we can go anywhere we want in our dreams and be with whoever we want. Let’s only talk about the dreams we want.” With that, Abigail, who is a great mimic, spoke in a perfect Liverpoolian accent, “We can have Beatle dreams! I want to be in London with George. Where do you want to go, Kiki?”

“I want to be in London, too, with Paul. Abby, would you like to go on a double date?” My proposal set off bed-shaking giggles, and we planned the flowers George and Paul would bring us and our outfits—long purple velvet dresses, pointy-toed lace-up boots, peacock feather boas, and wide-brimmed hats or Mondrian inspired mini-dresses and stack heeled shoes. We’d walk along Thames and see all the sights and go to the most expensive, luxurious, yummy restaurants in whole world.

Sometimes Abigail told me that she met her father in her dreams, and she wanted to dream him with her again. On those nights I tried to help her bring into him being. I saw him emerge in light from the wooded hilltop, and walk toward us along the brook where iridescent dragonflies skimmed the water’s surface. He wore a black sports coat and baggy trousers and a fedora. When he reached us, he knelt on one knee before Abigail, and pulled an imaginary creature from his pocket—it wasn’t a mouse or a bird or any animal for which we have a name. “Remember?” he said. The little creature stood on its hind legs on his palm, and Abby nodded and stroked its head.

Other times, Abigail would cry bitterly, “I don’t have a father! I don’t have a father!” I was only six when Abigail and I began our friendship. I was too young to know that our parents, each of them, produced literally hundreds of poems about the suicides of Abigail’s father and my grandfather. I can’t remember not knowing that her father had hung himself, but somehow, I’ve since learned, that fact was kept secret from Abigail for years. I do remember when I tried to voice my intuition that my grandfather had also killed himself. When my mother described her father’s gentleness, his soft, healing hands—he was a doctor—she also sadly told me about her father’s death of “a creeping paralysis” (probably multiple sclerosis). When my father told me about his mother, her New England reserve and her properness, he also told me about her death: she’d fallen ill on a ship to Europe with my mother. So, sad, they never got to travel together. They immediately returned the U.S., and she died soon afterwards of pancreatic cancer. My father told exciting stories about his adventures with his father—they took a road trip out West and hit a deer in Wyoming; they sold watch straps on the train in order to fund going to see the Yankees; his father designed watches and branded them, Pierre Grange, which means Stone Barn in French—but how did he die? One day in the living room of our house in Vermont, I mustered the courage to ask, “Daddy, how did your father die?”

“We’ll talk about it another time,” he said, and I saw his body awkwardly scrunch up with grief or perhaps he was embarrassed by his evasive answer. I couldn’t bear my father’s pain, which I felt acutely, so I didn’t ask again. I knew my grandfather killed himself. I sensed that fact, as all children intuitively apprehend everything about their parents; for survival’s sake, they’re biologically programmed to know, to adjust, and to compensate. The way I compensated was to participate in the denial narrative, even after I figured out the story, through the poetry, I guess. Eventually, my father was able to discuss the suicide with me. But by then I’d already learned to distrust my perceptions. That distrust led me to allow other people to name reality. When I told my story, I hoped someone else would refine the raw materials of my speech and tell me the true, the good, the wise, and the real. 

You may say, “But you’ve been writing poetry since you were a child, how can you say your work doesn’t name reality?” For much of my life, my poetics could be summed up in Antonio Machado’s lines, “En mi soledad / he visto cosas muy claras / que no son verdad” (In my solitude / I’ve seen things very clearly / that aren’t true.”) Until recent years, I didn’t internalize his other lines: “La verdad es que lo es, / y sigue siendo verdad / aunque se piense al revés” :

The truth is what it is,

and still stays true

even if you think the reverse.

I wish when I asked my father how his father had died, he’d had sat down with me on the couch, and taken my hand in his, just as he did so many times when he read to me—“I take your hand, companion of the hills” he wrote in one my birthday poems. I wish he’d told me the truth in his even, steady voice, as he did in his later poem, “In Our Life Watch,” which tells the story my magical grandfather, a merchant of diamonds and watches, who made and lost many fortunes in what one newspaper article called his “Horatio Alger-like career.” Here are the last lines:

            He steps over the low railing, leaps,

            And floats in blind sorrow into May sun.

            Dad’s fallen again, but we can’t wake early

            and look up a small jewelry shop

            to peddle our wares and hearts,

            our soft Swiss straps or cold diamond,

            since death at last has cleaned us out.

How utterly simple, beautiful, and heartbreaking! I’m not saying that my poetry or anybody’s doesn’t name truth; it’s a striving toward it. Poetry – all writing, all art – is a process of discovery for both the artist and the reader. Shouldn’t this poem be enough? Shouldn’t all the poems be enough? My answer is no, I’m sorry to say. There’s a difference between art and life, between the artist and the person. There’s a difference between readers and a person’s family. Art isn’t the only place where one can be honest and insightful, one’s best self. Art might be mere practice for an ordinary person to sit face to face with a child and tell the truth that “is what it is / and still stays true / even if you think [or say] the reverse” or stay silent.

Abigail Stone

In our conversations, Abigail and I have discovered that we were practicing truth-seeking in our dreams. Sometimes it’s terrible to know what one shouldn’t know. I was told in a dream that my uncle had killed himself. I visited a friend in the hospital, though I didn’t  “know” he was ill, and my bed was two-thousand miles away. Not all dreams know and tell the unknowable and untellable. Yet the dreams (if that’s right word) that do invariably find a way to prove indisputably that they have uncannily told the dreamer the truth.

A couple of weeks ago Abigail posted a piece on her blog, House of Stone, about learning Hebrew. She wrote: “ I have learned to read ‘my father is coming,’ which is ironic, as my father has been dead since I was five years old, and yet I still believe at some point he will return.” He did return, many times. Now my dear friend has lost her mother, who happens to be one of the great poets of the world. Abigail, I’m closing my eyes and concentrating very hard before I sleep, just as I know you are. She is the dream returning, giving you the faith to tell the truth you know. 

My First Blog Post: To Abigail Blue Jay Stone with Love

On October 14, 2011, I reconnected with Abigail Blue Jay Stone, my childhood friend. Well, to say that Abigail is my childhood friend is too generic, too neutral. When I was Kiki and she was Abby, she was the sister I never had.  She was more than a sister. Three years older, she was the beloved big sister I looked up to, and who gave me courage to have a voice. Beginning when I was six, my family spent our summers in Vermont, twenty minutes away from Goshen, where Abigail lived with her two older sisters and her mother. All winter long in Indiana, I looked forward to returning home to Vermont, where I really lived, and where I’d be with Abby again.

When we had a sleepover, I’d have to spend the night in Goshen because her mom was afraid she’d lose her if she let her out of her sight—or least that’s the way it looked by my lights. If we invited Abby to come along with us to Lake Dunmore, she couldn’t come because she might drown or we might get into a car accident. I remember our picking out some Archie comics and Tiger Beat in Sid Rosen’s Ben Franklin Five and Dime, but that must have been when we’d gone to town for groceries in her mother’s station wagon. If we were lucky, we called out “Dibs on the way back!” quicker than anyone else, and we got to ride backwards, the broken yellow lines, pine trees, and mountains receding in the rear window as we sang “The Happy Wanderer” – “ValderEEE, Val-der-AH-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA! “

Like so many girls, we were in love with the Beatles. In 1964, when CBS broadcast the summer reruns of the Ed Sullivan Show, we walked (probably barefoot) the two miles to Abigail’s aunt’s to watch. There were thousands upon thousands of tiny baby toads hopping all over the damp dirt road, and innumerable fireflies in the fields, and the dark was nearly pure and the millions of stars in the Milky Way shone brighter than anything, and I was with Abby (and some other girls, too)—and all of this added up to joy and to my joy to see the Beatles almost live on TV. We sat on the rug, a braided one my memory says, impatient for Ed to finish up his introduction, the jerky dance he did as he spoke. When Beatles sang, I felt love catch in my throat. During “Till There Was You,” their names floated beneath their faces in white caps: PAUL, RINGO, GEORGE, JOHN – SORRY GIRLS, HE’S MARRIED. We lived the Beatles’ songs and understood the world through their music and lyrics. We’d sprawl on Abby’s bed listen to all our Beatles albums over and over on her record player (yes, we had record players). If one of us jumped to the wide-plank floor and made the record skip, she’d have to apologize to the girl whose favorite Beatle was singing. Abby’s favorite was George. Mine was Paul because John—sorry girls—was married. As the Beatles’ imagination developed, so did ours, and my favorite became John—he still is.

As a teenager, Abby became Blue Jay, learned how to play guitar, and wrote songs. She still writes wonderful songs, still has an astonishing voice. Abigail, whether she was Abby or Blue Jay, didn’t leave behind her child self. Abigail and Phoebe, her older sister, still pulled out the cardboard boxes full of miniatures and we played “Tiny Furniture.” We made a whole village on the front porch floor. Abigail had a different voice for each of the figures, miniature Minnie and Mickey Mouse, the little people and bears and dogs. She acted out whole dramas impromptu. I was shy, afraid to try a voice, and Abigail drew me out: “Here you go, Kiki, you can have Minnie. She’s very nice and will tell you what she wants you to say.” I don’t know if those were the exact words, but something like that, something reassuring, something to give me faith that there’s “magic everywhere.”

The back of the Stone’s old farmhouse was an apple orchard, and deep in the orchard was a white playhouse, where we’d enter our fairy tale in the making. One day Abby and I were sisters—orphaned sisters, of course—and a witch cast a spell on her that made her forget who she was and who I was. I chased her through the orchard, past her mom tending the hollyhocks and foxgloves that leaned against peeling clapboard, out to the road, round the big maple. “Please remember you’re my sister! Come with me, come back home!”

“I don’t know who you are! Why are you bothering me? Go away!”

I kept pleading and she stayed in character so convincingly that I took it to heart. “Please stop, Abby.”

“My name’s not Abby, you fool, it’s Dianne.”

I turned away, bent over the car’s dark blue hood to hide my face, and cried. Abby stroked my hair. “What’s the matter, Kiki?”

“You were being mean. You weren’t you.”

“It wasn’t me, it was a pretend person.”

“You didn’t know who I was anymore.”

“It was just a game. I know who you are, Kiki. Let’s play something else, okay?”

When I spent the night, I didn’t know if I’d be in Goshen one night or several. I guess sometimes my parents weren’t up for making the drive the next day and they couldn’t call ahead. Communication wasn’t so easy in those days. For a while, Abigail’s family only had a pay phone on the front porch. We didn’t even have a phone in our Vermont home for the first three years, and after that we had a party line (like “Mayberry, R.F.D.,” minus the always happily resolved family drama). I was happy for as much time as I could get with Abby, so I felt a mixture of disappointment and gladness when we heard the rare vehicle on the dirt road and I recognized our family car arriving in a cloud of dust. My parents and my two younger brothers, radically wired and skinny, would make their way through the high grass to the farmhouse, with Poochie and Coalie barking crazily from the screened-in front porch. The much-mythologized get-together commenced. We cooked together (with the cats, George Harrison and Frank O’Hara, underfoot). Dinner was spaghetti, garlic bread, and salad. We ate sitting around the fireplace, roasted marshmallows for dessert. We played the poetry game. We made art and we were, each of us, “Marvelous!”

We both have parents who are larger-than-life literary figures, renowned for their work, generosity, and mentoring and nurturing aspiring writers. They do possess all the wonderful characteristics attributed to them. And they also wounded us, not on purpose. I think that for them their art is salvific, and that, like many children of people who produce and excel, somehow we got the message that they loved us for what we make, not for who we ARE. Abigail and I realized how much we miss each other, how much we long to be active friends again, because of a Facebook misunderstanding that was my fault, and about which I’m so sorry.  I gushed one too many times about her mother being my poetry mother. Abigail protested, “YOU and I were friends when we were children. You were friends with ME, Kiki, not my mother. If all you can say to me is how much you adore my mother, then please tell her, don't tell me.” Maybe it’s taken me this long to get over being the adoring younger one. Maybe it takes over a half a century to heal, and to understand that I am loved in return. Maybe it takes all these years to find my voice and confess, “I look at your profile ALL the time, longing to reconnect with you. I'm crying as I write this. You can't even imagine how much I love you, have always loved you.”

“You see, we share not only history but such similar upbringings,” Abigail wrote. “We have writing and everything, absolutely everything, in common." And she’s right.  We both have a Jewish father and a Christian mother and have changed Jewish names. We’re Ashkenazi from the same region. We both have suicides in our family. Since it’s everything, absolutely everything, the list goes on and on. When I constructed this blog a year ago, I thought I’d post some memories, some little vignettes that might help me give some shape for my research on family history, anti-Semitism and prejudice, mental illness and suicide. I want to write a counter-narrative to the denial narrative. Since then, I’ve been casting about for over a year, trying to find voice. I couldn’t even find a way to post something, not a sentence.

When we were children—and then two days ago—Abigail showed me that sometimes we make mistakes and hurt a loved one, but love—real love that sees and knows the other—heals and redeems. She reminded me of who I am and who she is. We together—playing pretend, writing, singing, drawing, dancing, telling secrets, listening to Beatles, walking barefoot on the dirt road in Goshen—were free in our imaginations. Abigail made me brave. She showed me I have a voice, and, like Walt Whitman, I can speak in as many voices as I want: “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Abigail’s loving, corrective words opened the floodgates, as they say. That’s why I’m devoting my very first blog post to her. From the beginning, she’s been my friend, spiritual sister, and support. And now she’s given me a way to begin again.