In the only old-time tailor shop still open downtown
the wife wears the style of long dark drab dress
her mother might have worn in one of the Polish ghettos
generations before Kristallnacht
Both she and her husband hang long gray swatches under
eyes that might have seen the worst of humankind,
facial expressions frozen in distrust and scorn
They still speak in thick accents spoken with no need
to be more clear
Summer or winter their arms are covered down to the edges
of their knuckles and the texture of the cloth seems as coarse
as the wood of the beams in attics in charred farmhouses
in the overgrown fields of the old country
When I stand at the worn counter she and I look down
at the dark printed numbers on my claim ticket,
and in a quiet voice that sounds of a cooing dove
in the shadows of a lost afternoon, she calls out
in a faint and mournful voice:
“Yah-coooob! Yah-coooob!
The man has come for the suit”