Brother Staś
I.
Between Drohiczyn and Tehran
is Arkhangelsk and, of course, the train.
It is nineteen forty-two.
Your parents’ graves are smaller
than telegraph poles and as indistinct
from other parents’ graves
as telegraph poles from telegraph poles
or breadcrumbs from breadcrumbs.
When you cross the Caspian Sea
to Pahlavi and Tehran,
your sister and brother
do not succumb to typhoid.
As for me I find, in fever dreams, the body
takes on qualities of darkened rooms,
all grain and grit and endless motes,
the white noise of scattered gravel
on woodland paths clever with brothers
who know the way back home.
And indeed it must have seemed
as though you were a stone
when you woke, an only child among lost children
so left behind that the backs of their sisters
and brothers moving on from sickness
were fantasies opulent as gingerbread houses.
II.
Unadorned for the miraculous,
a boiled egg cools to the heat of Easter in Tehran.
It is nineteen forty-two.
Hunger and convalescence have made you slight:
you juggle and peel,
and with the heatproof teeth of a fire-eater
reveal the improbable marigold
of a new life bashful with his acts of kindness;
you step from the crawling tent into the heart
of a white-hot day in which your brother,
unadorned for the miraculous,
appears.
III.
Between Tehran and Marigold Street
is Valivade and, of course, the sea.
HMT Asturias is, apparently,
a woman just like you,
and can no more imagine her final days
as RMS Titanic
in the film A Night to Remember
than you can imagine your brother
leaving England for New England,
or your brother flying home
to Marigold Street, the family saint,
growing another heart in his old man’s head.
It is nineteen forty-eight.
You are yet to fall in love
with cups of tea;
when your daughter comes
to redefine him, he will give
your English neighbours rationed leaves
for powdered egg; he will become
an uncle the way a ship survives
its maiden voyage only to be repurposed,
flooded and abandoned
and refitted as the ship that brought you
to your second home.
Fellow Traveller 2
Laika, little lemon, little bug,
we should not have done it—we can say that, now.
Your death was unjustified: we did not learn
enough; one summer’s day might have achieved
as much, one sunstruck car with the windows shut.
Dresses
It is time to launder dresses in Valivade;
a white-blonde, freckled orphan is playing mother
to a young girl old enough to be her sister.
One girl will wash the other’s only dress
while the other waits, a nude Coppélia,
as like a child as a mannequin.
Irena gathers her limbs like kindling, perched
on the handlebars of a push-bike, dolly-light,
a cotton vulture knotted in her hair,
a matching dress sewn fast to the shape of the day
Marysia learned to make dresses in Valivade.
Tidiness
When I came to the sea I was clean as a sheet,
and, unsurprisingly, I had to swim
for miles before the smell of pink
and feathers left my fingertips for goo...