I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman

GOATS

GOATS The trick is to make memory a blessing . . . — Dana Gioia Down on your knees, you sift through the past with your father; when he leans in you catch the aftermath of his shampoo and evergreen shower gel and, beneath that, the deep, familiar combustion of the body—the room in which we sleep, each one of us, every night of our lives with the windows closed. Here’s a picture of you in Denmark— around you, torsos of trees like the long-polished bodies of brass instruments. How happy you were. And what a shock to realize you no longer remember what such happiness felt like. And here you are at that gypsy fair in Cyprus where you and your father ate cold sweet corn, sold on the cob from wicker baskets filled with ice, while, among the rocks of the walls, scorpions slept on in drawers of shadow with, now and then, a wink of armour as sunlight returned to the world’s great room as the clouds went over, and you wandered, by accident, into that agon under the almonds where the young goats were being slaughtered for the spit. Dust and a few pale shocks of grass. How weightless they appeared; how swiftly each was hoisted and strung from the branch by its back legs. Shackle of fingers around each muzzle. Each throat angled for the knife. Your father 30 remembers dropping his hands to the yoke of your narrow shoulders, wheeling around and steering you, like a bicycle, down the hillside and into the crowd; but the things he believes he spared you are not the things that have come to haunt you. Yes, you tell him, you remember the quick scarves of blood, the plump torsos twisting and pitching, how the front legs galloped as the body struggled to keep ahead of what it knew was coming; the tree branch bouncing wildly and blood on the ground skinning over in the heat and fresh pips of blood sending up blown kisses of dust. Then the stillness that settled, the lax stretch of the body, and the head, nearly severed, swinging, a scarlet bell, level with the butcher’s crotch. How the smoothness of an animal peeled out of its skin is familiar and terrible, the glint of its nakedness almost human. But what haunts you is the memory of those lying trussed in the shade, waiting their turn; the soft, clogged sounds of their language and how they never once stopped talking, quietly, amongst themselves; the almonds in the trees, each one locked in its golden suitcase among the leaves, and the leaves like the polished tongues of church shoes. All these years your father has lived believing he saved you, which is every father’s wish and failure; and you don’t know what to do, now, 31 to assuage his sadness other than promise yourself you will write about this even though art is like the past and what we learn to love is a fiction, and what we come to trust might never have existed, and what we remember never really happened the way we remember it. The way they strained to reach the sparse grasses and every leaf, shaken loose, that came down within reach; how, until the last permissible moment, they took the world in, small mouthful by small mouthful and, right there— where the lion-yellow mouths of sunlight dropped through the canopy and opened up in the dust— turned it over, slowly, between their teeth. 32 ...