“From her bench in the park near her house, the woman who Rebecca so beautifully and poignantly portrays quietly carries us through the seasons of the infinite world of a woman’s long life. From the sharp blades and searing heat of youth, loss, grief, fear, desperation and shame to the mature exhilaration of the night sky ‘moving only in a perfect cycle through the seasons.’ From a ‘necklace made of blades‘ in the ‘lives tried on,’ to the ‘oil and sweat‘ on the ocean air of the Baltimore of her young self, to ‘behind the moon (where) a white fog rolls in to cover the heavens. (Where) no one here can penetrate that secret part of the winter sky.’
The Bench is a book for those of us of all ages living through the mysteries of our shared lives.” — Martha Ruschman
“The Bench, illusory and yet with precise detail, looks at a woman’s life through the seasons of the year — ‘My progress is to wear myself smooth, a stone clean and polished by a pure salt sea.’ These poems, sometimes mournful, are always questioning. Like Rebecca, they are unflinching in their honesty, intellect, and wisdom.” –Barbara Shema
The Bench is currently available from Classic Lines Bookstore (5825 Forbes Ave In Squirrel Hill, 412-422-2220, classiclinesbooks@gmail.com) and is also available in all of the Allegheny County Public Libraries.
About the author: Rebecca Taksel spent much of her life as a teacher, a job that she loved. She taught French Language, French Literature, English, World Literature and ESL (English as a Second Language) at Point Park University. Rebecca worked with the AFL-CIO in a successful drive to unionize adjunct professors. In 2019, she taught lifelong learning courses in French Literature for the OSHER program at both Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.
Rebecca pursued a writing life for many years and was a member of the Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow University and a contributing editor of the Redwood Coast Review, a literary quarterly.
She was a lifelong advocate for civil rights, animal rights, and environmental causes, and she volunteered for many years at the CC Mellor Library in Edgewood. She was a dancer and taught Latin social dancing into her sixties. Rebecca and her sister Martha worked together for over 25 years as designers in Martha’s residential interior design firm. Rebecca Taksel died on August 7, 2020.”
About the artist: “Barbara Shema returned to Pittsburgh in 2013 after living in Budapest Hungary, Albany NY, and Providence RI. Over the past several years, she has been pushing boundaries between various art processes…photography, collage, and mixed media on paper.
She began making photo-collage compositions after returning from Budapest in order to process her experience of having lived in this city that is still resurrecting itself after WWII. The photo-collages were created by printing her original photographs on paper, cutting out images, and applying them in overlapping layers with acrylic medium onto stretched canvas.
She is a member of Pittsburgh Society of Artists and Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic poetry workshops. She has an undergraduate degree in Art Education from Indiana University of PA, and a graduate degree in Educational Leadership from Carlow University.
In Pittsburgh, her art was represented by GalleriE CHIZ and the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts gift shop until their closings in 2017 and 2019. Barbara’s art can be viewed at BarbaraShemaArt.blogspot.com.”
My progress is to wear myself smooth
My progress is to wear myself smooth, a stone, cleaned and polished by the pure salt sea. The ashes of my brother are not a fine smooth dust but a pebbly mix, a gravel studded with bone, purified by fire. You cannot live after immersion in fire, but you can be purified by water, and by the air on windy days: those gusts that tumble you around, flatten you against walls and benches, leaving you gasping—if the wind is cold enough you feel cleansed.
I see Joe on a bench
I see Joe on a bench in a park
maybe my park, I think so.
Sometimes he is the old man
he never became,
sometimes he is young, my little brother,
one arm flung along the top of the bench,
feet in running shoes
ankle crossed on opposite knee.
I want to come close and talk to him,
but I need words that are careful
and quiet, so he won’t disappear.
I want words like thin breezes,
or like sun crazy with summer dust
from the garden path,
or golden and fluttering like ginkgo leaves.
I want words to speak in a whisper
to his sad eyes,
words that brush his cheek and fly away.
I want to hold his calloused hands, lightly,
so I feel the pulses in his fingers.
Can I do this?
Or will I wake up sobbing,
his image exploded,
his death a swirl of loud screaming winds?
Today was cold and overcast
Today was cold and overcast, a sort of weather I have come to love. It was
a day of crows. They were mad, screaming all over the sky, all day,
lighting in the trees of the park, one, then another, legs held under them
neatly, as if they might pick up offerings from the ground. Their immense
wings were violent and intemperate, like their chorus of raw speech. Why
do I know nothing about them, whether it was the season that sent them
into their wild performance, or the weather, or an enemy, or a ritual of
their own, something to do with celebration, or competition? I’ve never
heard or read anything about crows being happy. Exultant, maybe. But
why should all those wheelings and callings not be about happiness? They
were so close to me, falling and gliding from above the trees and houses. I
stood up from the bench and turned and turned, my neck craning until it
hurt, to follow the spectacle. That was early in the day, and again in the
afternoon when I came back out. Finally, I checked the park at dusk, and
they were gone. The heavy gray mass of cloud had lifted. The sky was
lighted blue-black but clear. It was a moment I was glad to see: so many,
now, like that. They are each one first, and last, or might be. I live finally
in a turning sphere, moving only in a perfect cycle through the seasons.
This excerpt from The Bench by Rebecca Taksel is published here courtesy of the publisher and should not be reproduced without permission.
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