Three Bird Elegies
-After Kaminsky
I.
[In a courtyard, at nine years, three boys held me down on the cobble-stones, and spat in my mouth. The oldest jammed five quarters under my tongue so I wouldn't tell anyone. Years later, I'm writing the book of my life, and confess: I bought a hard boiled egg with the money. Behind a church, I pried it open, sucked down the yolk without sharing with the pigeons. Ever since, I've been ignored by birds.]
My grandmother tells us when she dies
to bury her in the sky. That way the doves
will wash her face, and pull the clouds
up to her chin. Years before, surrounded by ducks
in a park, she scatters bread crumbs, tells me
of peaches, fish soups, Hitler. At nineteen,
four men with swastikas tattooed on their knuckles
held her down, jammed themselves inside her.
She prayed toward Jerusalem, her hands balled
tight over her breasts. Scummbles of crows
scattered down when they left her broken-wristed,
drooling blood, and from her satchel
she pulled out crackers, spilt them onto the street.
Ever since, she’s been loved by birds.
II.
Carrying my father, she let him drink from the vines
inside her, read to him poems she kept in her
apron, made jams and wines from the vineyard.
My uncle slept frantically in her belly.
After he came out the neighbor boys held
his head in a muddy puddle, yelled out retard, retard,
retard, and the boroughs inside her trembled then,
and again when she found him dead in the kitchen, his blood
a cherry red smear on the stove. I retell this story
and beg my memory please, go to sleep.
[This is a story I once heard: my grandmother was dreaming of her husband picking apples and tossing them in a barrel, but the only color in her dream was yellow. That afternoon, while he was taking a nap, she counted his pulse. The blood ran smooth. She opened the bedroom window and in scurried a blackbird. For a moment, my grandfather's blood babbled. She awoke him and asked to be taken into the city. The pigeons scoured the parking lot before they walked there.]
It is almost April. The sun has begun its yearly fury,
and with my sister, I watch the nurses turn her over. They wash
her shoulders, her genitals. We close the shades by her bed;
the only lights are flickering on the machines,
and what they’ve called suicide I call mercy.
III.
Thank you, Lord, for life. It’s nice to walk
to the mailbox, and to write poems in my sleep.
[In her front yard, a Jewish girl describes to herself the clouds: an octopus, an angry bathtub, a horse with a snake of fire for a tail. When she grows old, she describes the clouds to me: a mockingbird, a raven, three happy swans. It starts to rain, washing off the chalk of our sidewalk drawings. I begin to sob then. Years later, she begins to die. I tell her to go to sleep in the sky. She tells me to watch over the birds.]
Thank you, Lord, for death. It’s such sweet
juice from a fruit you always ring out dry.