Into the Shell of My Ear
Aunt Bird on What Happened to the Alphabet When the War Broke Out
The alphabetâs letters, she whispered, quivered.
Each one fell on its belly as bombs shocked the air
and rattled needles on fir tree branches.
Every panicked letter, with nothing but the clothes
on its back, dove into the riverâs oily sinews.
The afternoon made of fever and stink.
Onto the bank, where weeds and thistles hissed,
she watched her neighbor, Joseph, haul a bloated Lamed,
burdock burrs stuck to its shirt, its face a bellows.
She saw a drowned Vov bob up-and-down as if it were tossing
in its sleep. It was tangled in wild lilac and mint,
buzzing clouds of flies above the writhing water.
That Vovâs skin was wrinkled and blue.
One of its feet clung to a sock and the sole of a boot,
shattered pinecones in its hairâ
[Bone by bone, she remembered]
Bone by bone, she remembered
what it was like to change from body into light,
that the month of March had had no time for grief
and tore up her belly
until there were just black plums there
like ancient letters split in twoâ
Al-ef, B-et, Gi-mel, Da-let.
She recalled she had once lived
blowing into a glass cup,
that the eyes and ears of the already dead
would sprout each night
from the cityâs starless womb.
And she dreamed, with elbows over tangled sheets,
of Limanowska, a curved eyebrow
of a ghetto street, paved with sighs,
sonorous with horseflies;
of the trolley on its hands and knees;
and of the Vistulaâs liquid muscles.
KrakĂłw, she thought,
when the moon ate
its own stony light,
you watched me
in love only once,
how my stomach shivered.
She Lived Amid the Tumult of an Occupied City
The war thrust its hand inside her.
It churned her belly and her heart.
And she lived amid the tumult
of an occupied cityâa donkey led
by its bridle. Surrounded by the enemy
laughing about the names it had for Jew,
she asked herself how many ways
she could say madness and watched
soldiers round up those whose fingers danced
on the words of the Torah.
Those who sat under a cafĂ©âs awning
stirring a cup of tea
were also rounded up; those bargaining
for beets piled high in the market;
those hanging wet sheets over balcony railings
were dragged from their apartments;
and those stopped to show identity cards
where peddlers sold bright balloons
were hauled away under the sharp beams
of streetlamps. Walls were peppered
with gunfire, bluebells speckled red.
Her people reeled along cobbled streets,
each person clutching a sack
containing things the enemy let them keep.
She was a short breath of a girl
who nursed an oriole
that sipped, in the mustard glow
of a Sabbath afternoon,
the crimson from poppies. A girl
who blamed herself for kissing
a boy beneath a tangerine moon
and for believing in anything
that didnât rustâresistance,
revolt, joy (sometimes) and songs
not exiled from the spirit.
To hell with the enemy, she trilled
in Yiddish, her nostrils widening,
her voice tugging the air. And for singing
she blamed herself also, scolded herself
in a language rising from her lips like steam.
[Night after night, what she saw in her sleep]
Night after night, what she saw in her sleep:
an upside-down Havdalah candle like the one she lit
to usher in a new week at the end of every Sabbath,
praying, âBlessed God, who separates light from dark. . .â
The candle in her dreams, like her real candle,
had four wicks and four braided strands of wax,
but produced no flames, only entrails of light.
And she dreamt God unhinged the constellations
and whisked away the stars. Uncreating. Uncreating.
The pitch darkness: a grave she couldnât find a way out of.
And she dreamt she was a stone a crow lifted
and tucked into the wind:
a girl born to memory that hushes the sun
and takes the place of treesâ shadows.
When she woke, the war still raged
and the sky hardened into rock.
She wondered: why is God doing this?
And the thunder thundered: why are people doing this?
Despair swooping over her, her grief a kind of wingspan.
Delirious as the rain the river guzzled,
she became a stranger to herself,
circling her own shadow, searching for her beliefs,
her mind like shattered glass,
and the world stuck in her throat like a boneâ
[The TVâs on mute; its cool glow scrubs the room]
The TVâs on mute; its cool glow scrubs the room. Iâm at my computer, picturing my aunt with no suffering inside her, drinking milky coffee, and eating sponge cake under the striped awning of a KrakĂłw cafĂ©.
The 1938 city square gleams like a forehead. Nothing yet splits the voices from the streets. The rain of gunfire is still far away. Horse-drawn carriages rim sidewalks, bells stitched to reins clinking. The moment spreads out like the fingers of lamplight stroking shop windows. My aunt has many things to say, peeling the skin from her ideas.
Later, when time capsizes, sheâll feel the hammer of loose heat the one summer ...