Say uncle, and: Considering the options, and: A ritual

Say uncle

Along the way, he stopped caring for sleep—if he had morphine or bologna for lunch— if the birthday cake was made with flour or flowers—he just wanted to play his violin— the one they buried with him— the one his father carried out of Minsk before the war—play for the old cancer woman across the street—for himself— for the curtains and the wind in the curtains— I brought him a cup of tomato soup once, he asked me to drink it and tell the authorities he had, and while I helped him lie, he played a tune that sounded like me catching frogs along the Grand River, as if my past were a little bird he’d watched and watched cross the sky— it’s hard for me to say he starved himself to death in French or Spanish, otherwise I’m happy he left when and how he wanted—his violin is with him but not his bow— he gave it to me instead of money, which flies away— instead of a cow, which runs out of milk— instead of crying, which has no purpose other than rust— I touch it now and then to my ear—almost in the way I let snow brush against me and remind me I am not the world but a thing the world holds

Considering the options

A long time ago, I loved a bank teller. I was working back then beating the ocean with a stick, an internship with outrage. She liked that half of my face was on the other side. I liked that her little lisp sounded like a man pushing a broom at the far end of a factory, and that she thought cancer was a ghost she could talk out of her body. Her optimism contrasted nicely with my wet shoes. She’d point out simple but sustaining facts, like as soon as I walked out the door, the sky touched the top of my head as my grandfather did, old soft skin of blue sky. I asked her one day, “What’s the difference between a bank teller and a fortune-teller?” I assumed it was money, but it was scarves, though her scarves, too, were about seeing the future. One day she’d have green not-hair, the next day, red. I thought a wig would have been better, but silk made her feel her head was a blank canvas. We stopped seeing each other when she died. I’d still see her on some level, but doubted she saw me. I took a chance anyway and told her how hard I was trying to believe she was alive. Nothing. The dead are so rude. Or consistent. Or far away, drumming their fingers, wondering why we haven’t shown up for the plane, the play, the trapeze act about to start.

A ritual

You confuse thinking the sky is beautiful with telling it how much you appreciate it, I believe because the voice in your head is as real as your arm going into the river up to your shoulder to reach the doll on the bottom, the one with open eyes that have never blinked. So you do that— you fish it out and help the eyes blink, hold it in your lap and call it baby, either the one you lost in our toilet or the one you asked away at the doctor, and those, it turned out, were our only chances. This is how I dream you in your new life. This is how I like to imagine you mourn the almost. Also I love sky and rivers, that rivers hold the look of sky and sky drinks the water of rivers slowly, little sips all the time. But more than this, a drowned thing is baptized by its death, as is an arm holied by reaching into water. I don’t believe in souls. So the souls of unborn children are even smaller nothings, tinier nots. Hence my effort here to...