Two Eves, and: Cenotaph, and: Ode to Branca

Two Eves

Marya Abramowicz,your two braids, a railroadon your chest.

Up and down your braids a train runs.Your grandson plays a string quartetwith a pocket knifeon the train glass.

Outside—ever-red pines.The train claps, claps, claps, claps.

Marya Abramowicz,mouth at shoulder length!

Marya Abramowicz,are they braids or truck tracks?

Marya Abramowicz bakes gray bread.

A moon riblies on the kitchen table.

Marya Abramowicz, make yourselfa tiny Eve,to ease your nights,to make chickens laugh.

Cenotaph

In a chance encounter, a stranger who knew you in your Mordovian evacuation, described the horrible hunger, and described you as a hungry boy who always carried a book.

I

On this table made of foreign treesthe bread of silence, unbroken.

Mute, a portrait of myself: I'm framed

into the back of the chair. And you are here,yet not. Your bones in the womb of the earth,yet not, a hungry boy with a book, in a mass gravenext to your twins-in-death, your name,that sounded foreign to them,is changed for a Russian namein an act of unbaptism.Yet not.

The bread sits on the square wooden shoulders.

When you go hungry for months,your heart is a red bone.All I see when I open a book is your empty stomach.

II

Sometimes your stomach is a magnifying lens.With it, I search from page to pagefor an old potato dug into the soil of print.

I go so mad I listen to the pages of bookswondering if you chewed on the roots of treesturned this paper.

Into my stomach-sized fistI fold a raisin, a walnut, some sugar.With this fist I knock the air out of air,strike whatever's around.

About me: I often spent a whole day between parking lotswhere cars resemble giant turtle shells abandoned by all life.From these turtle cemeteries

        I watch hills—ophthalmic distortion,        red barns—ants on my eye bulbs.

Doctor prescribed me drops of Lethe water.

Why do I speak to you?Favorite grandchild of your favorite sister,the more Lethe I put into my eyes, the closer I am to you.

Inside my Noah's Ark—ghosts ready to beget ghosts.

Do you know what a ghost looks like?It looks like blood.

III

Sitting a breath away from you, I'm afraidof my tongue's shadow move in the cornersof my mouth.

I pulled this house over my head like a castto heal fractured sanity, thought to thought.

I silenced all past by the spell of a camera flash,yet not.

So,if there'd be a sound between us,let it be one that starts

with touch,which is music.

Music that, over accordion keys,unclenches the fist of ancestry,loosens fingers into rose petals.

Family tree is not a tree, but a rose bud,petals tied together, mouths down.

In bed at night you listened for the soundof an iron gate squeal like at slaughterand licked your lips. Then, silencestraightened its shoulders inside your nostrils.

You died on a hospital sheet bleachedand starched until it seemed to be madeout of ironed bones.

What does the family rose think about thatas my pen stands up like hair on top of this paper?

From one hospital-white key to the next,I carry my dead in order to tuck them intothese shrouds weaved out of sound.

I bury them, properly, one by one,inside the piano-key coffins.

I rush—I learned to rush from the earth!Earth, a bladder full of dirt and snow.

Yet, not.

Ode to Branca

There's a life in which I fly up the stairswith a pharmacy bag full of pills for Branca.

Oh, medicinal currency! Branca's rented health!My virginity, a small pink coin in my pocket.

There's a hungry city that hides its column-ribsunder a nurse-clean robe of snow epidemics...