1.
His ears his mouth his
nostrils having filled
with ash, his cheekbones
chin (all ash) and on the ash a tide
of seawrack that cannot
be right a trail of scum or
vomit then and either
his shoulder’s been crushed by the
blast or angled on the stretcher so
oddly that raising
his arm to ward us off
he seems to be more damaged than he
is, and eyes
that should have cracked the
camera. This was not
the current nightmare this was two
or three nightmares ago, the men
were loading plums and
peaches onto trucks at
Qaa. And though in my lucky and
ignorant life I have never so much as
encountered the scent
of explosives (I
had taken a different bus that day,
the city I live in is thicker with
doctors than all of Beka’a
is thick with bombs), I’ve
seen those eyes before exactly.
Failures of decency closer to home.
2.
(The clearing of the ghetto)
Red wool, and falsely brightened, since
we need the help.
A child because
the chambers of the heart will hold so
little. If the filmmaker, having
apprenticed in fables,
proposes a scale for which,
he hopes, we’re apt and if
this bigger-than-a-breadbox slightly-
smaller-than-the-microwave is
just about the vista we can
manage, let’s agree to call it history, let’s
imagine we had somehow seen its face
in time. But where
in all of Kraków is
the mother who buttoned her coat?
A city steeped in harm-to-come,
the film stock drained
to gray. The sturdy
threading-forward of a child who
might be panicked by the crowd but
has her mind now on
a hiding place. Our
childlike conviction that she shall be
spared. Mistake that brings
the lesson home: we lack
retention.
Chalk mark on a clouded screen.
3.
But what was it like, his dying?
It was like
a distillation.
You had morphine? We had
morphine, but he couldn’t use
the bed. The bed?
His lungs were so
thickened with tumors and phlegm
he had no way of breathing there.
You’d rented the bed?
He climbed down beside it
and asked for his tools. When something
was broken he fixed it, that had
always been the way with him.
So then . . . We left him in his
chair. But as the day went on we thought
he needed bedding so we tried to
lift him. That’s the once
he blamed us. That’s
the look you meant. The why-
can’t-you-people-just-leave-me-alone,
the where-is-your-sense-
of-shame. I will
remember it until I die myself.
You meant well. Meaning well
was not enough.
We meant that he
should know this wasn’t lost on us.
The urn that holds his ashes does
a better job.
4.
Sister partridge, brother hare.
The linen on the table
with its hemstitch. I
have read the books on pridefulness:
the bounty of game park and sideboard
and loom, the ships
that brought the lemon trees,
the leisure that masters the view. But
I have come to think
the argument-by-likeness makes
a simpler point. The lemon,
for example, where the knife has been:
the pores, the pith, the luminescent
heart of it, each differential
boundary bound to open.
Meaning death, of course, the un-
protected flesh about to turn, but just
before the turn, while looking
can still be an act of praise.
I see you in the mirror every morning
where you wait for me. The linen,
Father, lemon, knife,
the pewter with its lovely
reluctance to shine. As though
the given world had given us
a second chance.