Like a Word That Somersaults Through the Air.

• Author: Espada, Martin
• Position: Poem

for Abe Osheroff, 1915-2008

His life begins with the rain, and the soggy cushions of a couch left by the landlord to die on a Brooklyn sidewalk in the year 1930. His life begins at age fifteen, Abe the high school wrestler straining the cords in his neck to lift the couch with the other boys back through the doorway of a tenement in Brownsville. His life begins with a woman who could not pay the rent, staring dumbstruck on the corner at the miracle of eviction evicted, the landlord a lord no more, her sons and daughters trailing in a procession after the sofa. His life begins with the cop who arrives on the corner waving a...