‘A Killing During Occupation’ and other poems

A Killing During Occupation

At the family chicken farm in Kiev,
a widowed mother twines the rope in her sack,
thinks how quick the spokes of the hen’s neck

will snap, tighter than the braid wheat spins
in the barn’s souring chaff. She smells
the air’s sifting hay, and says, the seeds

the chickens peck are fevered, and recalls
walking, hunched down along the trough,
beneath a rib of light, lasered through

the slatted roof along the rafter’s coop,
how all morning, her shifting eyes
had feared the course the earth might take

to shake the sun free, once the tanks
had occupied the city square. And what
difference would it make, she thinks,

if in the killing of a hen that August noon,
her lone child running a pigling,
roaring through the goldenrod, discovers

a new mourning— a wreath of feathers
sickled from his favorite gilder’s breast?
She knows the old country, how it forgives.

She knows the earth could never move
faster than the night stars, and the hearts
of lovers she still keeps safe in the warm

shawls of her memory will never again
beat to her crippled smile. She knows.
She halts. Her sudden eye is caught.

She clutches the noose and swift
as the half-sign of the cross, strangle-
grips the cackler’s craw, as if to silence

her own sobbing fear. The right hand
not knowing the other, cycling the knot,
has shucked the whimper off.

Spinning Parasols

He no longer walks his sack, hands
wet along the park bench where he sleeps,
with hunched back, beneath a page of late news
and a piddling hat, the odor of bird stains.

His clothes fit any season, hand-outs
like his umbrellas, patched with oil cloth
and grease to keep the rain out,
to give the hope of living long

his talk pitch at each door,
where for a dime, he begs to show his art
of spinning parasols, of blowing up
the ribs without a hitch or leak.

To widows his wares are free.
Umbrella man of a dying breed, his marble
handles are pure antiques and well preserved
like saddle hide in ambergris.

Tonight at Mercy’s Cancer Ward
he prays for the raining in his joints
to leave his double back, for a soul’s
embrace with a last-chance nurse

who once, for a scone of bread, he bartered
the seduction of her affection, with hosiery
for her feet— and a parasol, spinning hues
of rainbows without a hitch or leak.

Visiting the Cemetery of the War’s Unknown Dead

These are backward years.
.        Dogs are not always dogs
or what they seem
.        to drunks or graveyard walls
who, merged in sleep,
.        pose for low whimpers
of midnight’s soft wind.
.        Dogs, like grave diggers,
hunt bones for reunions.

And whales are not always whales
.         or what they seem
to fish or fishermen, who’d rather
.        see them spewed aground
like hunks of meat,
.        beached rot-backs,
spawning worms with instinct.
.         Whales, like worms,
control the spot they breed.

We over-estimate our powers
.           of memory, the mind’s
dark tree, hatchet, wind, stump,
.           the swift slice
of a brain cut to size.

We leave such little proof
.           of ourselves.
Unless by taming dogs or whales,
.           sonars of intelligence,
we can teach the weight
.           of rumps and knees
and riders, cocked like triggers,
.           teaching death.

We thrive on amnesia, forgetting
.           that power breeds
in the minds of despots,
.           no matter what they seem
to all themselves or privately.
.           Even gods lose their minds
like children’s toys
.           and are misplaced as simply
and as often
.            as they seem to matter.