Marilyn Jurich is a poet, author, and Associate Professor Emerita of English at Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts. During her long academic career at the university, she specialized in a diverse range of subjects, including fantasy and folklore, speculative literature, children’s literature, and modern British poetry

Covering

Raw earth and rubble will not be recalled once the road is paved;
irregularities in nature and contours
invented by machine, covered smooth.

Sandor was a tailor,
the “old-fashioned” kind who cut out clothes, designed so breasts sulking
to the waist, sang out high and clear, curving spines rose as one swift line.
In Austria where he’d been a custom tailor Sandor created the perfect man and woman
through covering flawed nature or a nature failed.
Then came Dachau how many years?

Once in America, Sandor mostly altered or improved.
I met him months after Joscelyn was born a matter of needing someone to subtract that extra space from cloth
where growing life had burgeoned, and
transforming style to single body’s needs.

He might be mounting. Alps in Austria on picture cards he’d pasted
on the front wall of his shop.
Lace doilies, dolls in Alpine costume designed the window.
Behind the counter garments swirled at different elevations, as a mobile, and magazines on a
mosaic table
were layered in gradations.

Sandor shook your hand as if you were a guest.
Children he considered “wunderkin’,” kissed their cheeks and hands,
extended cookies under fingers he would fold. Each child was the spurt of life
Sandor had retained, had wrenched from Dachau. Perhaps his own children had died at Dachau.

His wife remained.
Behind the curtain dividing store
from workplace, she sometimes sat, mending.
Her clothes could not conceal a dwindling slope, the separate body parts dissolved
through loss of will.

This curtain cannot keep out the sound–the steam roller smooths the hot asphalt. There is something underneath
I cannot find. I have searched
in closets, fingering the flecks of tweed, groping deep in pockets.

After we moved away, maternity detached from cloth
had been a fact for several years, I heard what happened–
parts of the story we already knew.

Sandor’s wife had died and while
he still bustled, glazed cheeks were less healthy and more feverish,
eyes more grey than blue, mustache less whimsical.
Then he rallied.
A “pacemaker” restored his health and confidence; a new wife (fifty thereabouts), a distant cousin who also had survived.
People said she was “a manager.” Together they worked well; you felt affection which included you.
The window of the store had curtains now, lavender, green tassels,
she – his new wife – had sewn.

The rest is news report. One late Saturday
Sandor carrying the weekly profits home was intercepted, beaten, killed.
Police suspected a customer
who knew Sandor, knew his habits; could fit the parts together, cover them.

— Marilyn Jurich