Sivka-Burka, and: A Is for Air, and: Interstate, and: Notes from a Northern State

Sivka-Burka

Sleep’s smashed to shards. Lap- tops glow in bed after bed. Strangers pull strangers into their heads. And yet, as starlings scatter, unwired Russian grandmothers strip to drink

what’s left of the sun after the death of Stalin, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. No one pays attention to these women but themselves, as they harvest vitamin D directly,

laying out a foil sheet and broasting. Slowly, they turn tree-bark brown, not to please their husbands, but just to absorb something profound without reading.

A Is for Air

I

Dismantle the desks. Melt the monkey bars. Rip the clock off the wall. Augment the drinking fountain with fake   marble cupids and replace

childhood with something easier, say, lilacs afloat in their own scent,

and then, then I can go back to Fernwood School with my daughter and explain that school is impossible but worth the pain because you learn an alphabet that settles

  into marvels, into fearless Jane Eyre whose childhood was miserable, and whose face was plain.

II

Except my daughter is beautiful, and she hates long novels, and she’s adopted from a country with so many intimate gods that when I watch her I wonder whose supernatural hands are guiding her— but of course it’s just me, bringing her a lilac in a Coke-bottle vase, which she accepts, because she wants to be polite, as she steps gracefully over her Ps and Qs into her lace-up flying leather

miraculous

cheerleading shoes.

Interstate

Is it because I am finally old that my young body passes by?

I catch it in the corner of my eye. It has no clear gender.

Its shoes are in its hand. It is condemned to wander

the lots where truckers park their big rigs. Wheels are taller

here. Drivers log fake numbers in their books

to make long hauls last longer.

And on the dark shoulder, a stranger: that body. Its skin

fits too tightly. Its face is drawn,   more notion than person,

like a pencil sketch of nightfall fallen. Don’t look back,

wheezes Bob Dylan, on the radio between stations—

that body’s heart is not your heart, and all its cells are dead.

But Officer, I’m wide awake, I swear.Go ahead. Slap my face. Pull my hair.

Notes from a Northern State

We moved for jobs to the land of dead deer strapped to cars. Deer country sure ain’t horse country— no one rides anyone’s back.

It’s all fleeting sightings: a flash of fur, a horn, a single eye among the branches. Tiny ice-fishing houses dot the lake, and in each house, a man, a thermos,

and a phone with no reception. Can’t call the men. Can’t ask them how to gut fish, or smoke venison. Our mantle’s antler rack is ironic, from an L.A. thrift

store, hung with bits of broken chandelier, but it’s grown grave in Wisconsin, a state that’s neither boot- nor mitten-shaped,

but larger and harder to picture: rivers pour themselves into stillness. Jesus preached “Have faith” at Galilee, but here every lake is walkable in winter.

O Lord, we will always be strangers.