Fishing, and: Telling My Son About His Birth, and: Train

36 the minnesota review Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg Fishing I lie beside my baby who sleeps in his own wordless version of dream. Occasionally he parts his lips to taste the absence of my breast. Outside a train invents itself by its long whistle at the appointed time passing close to the river where some still fish just like grandpa, late at night, fishing for nothing but the abolition of time beside what I knew as me, still a baby who couldn't understand the words he used to explain fish, so I invented a huge cliff out of the ledge we sat on and tasted the drama of falling and being caught or not by grandpa busy tasting coffee, cigarettes and age while he slapped the first fish into the pail and said we would invent a house full of fish for grandma to clean the baby guts from while she muttered Yiddish words I wasn't meant to understand from a language that only existed in time, (having no country of its own). A language from a long time ago when father made mother taste blood on her lips and cry in foreign words, pressing my face into her ribs while she fished out her breast, singing, baby, baby, we live in a safe place I invent for you to sleep and grow in. But skin heals, inventing itself over scars, making them disappear to all but the time inside her or me, the same time that forms and multiplies a baby into existence while I sleep, grow, taste water slowly, eggs, toast, apples, fish not as food by words Mirriam-Goldberg 37 moving through me in an old language where words have a place but no time, even as my son invents his own world out of and away from me, fishing offa ledge without knowing all the times grandpa and I waited for the same taste of a first catch, a baby fish too small to keep so all three of us throw it back and invent a story of catching nothing, even now as time is air my baby son nurses, holding tight to the bodies that think, by inventing him, they invented something to catch time. Telling My Son About His Birth It was like visiting a house I'd only seen before between sleep and waking. I waited days to enter, but once inside, I was afraid of the dark and couldn't find the walls. Maybe there was a storm. I can't remember, only that I hurt and thought I wouldn't get out. I made noises. Then I found you— the top of your head black with hair. I pushed and pushed to get out, and when we did, into the hot room where your father and the doctor waited, I realized I was afraid most because this house was the world, and it was on fire. But you need to know there wasn't really a house at all or any shelter. There was a place I cannot name 38 the minnesota review but call birth and death. You could call it fear or love or god—it would still be the place of no place. Here, there is a real house. We have names for things and a name for you. We think we are past the fire, asleep in this chair, your belly on mine as we breathe on each other. Train Solomon waved through the train window to his parents. The platform moved back in time that would teach him the names of English flowers while it starved or gassed his parents into bones hollow as wind chimes. After hearing his story, I dream an escape from the camp. Branches mark my underside when I crawl below electric fences. Sometimes I hide in walls while Nazis drink cokes on the other side, or I race the weeds the wake on another continent where birds beat themselves on the windows. Here the sun is blinding as pain. Each half hour, trains make Sol's windows tremble, he walks into the garden and shows the names he remembers: delilah, lilac, poppy, peony. He measures the heat and rain, and...