His ears his mouth his
            nostrils having filled

with ash, his cheekbones
chin (all ash) and on the ash a tide

of seawrack that cannot
            be right a trail of scum or

vomit then and either
his shoulder’s been crushed by the

blast or angled on the stretcher so
            oddly that raising

his arm to ward us off
he seems to be more damaged than he

is, and eyes
            that should have cracked the

camera. This was not
the current nightmare this was two

or three nightmares ago, the men
            were loading plums and

peaches onto trucks at
Qaa. And though in my lucky and

ignorant life I have never so much as
            encountered the scent

of explosives (I
had taken a different bus that day,

the city I live in is thicker with
            doctors than all of Bekaa

is thick with bombs), I’ve
seen those eyes before exactly.

Failures of decency closer to home.


(The clearing of the ghetto)

Red wool, and falsely brightened, since
            we need the help.

A child because
the chambers of the heart will hold so

little. If the filmmaker, having
            apprenticed in fables,

proposes a scale for which,
he hopes, we’re apt and if

this bigger-than-a-breadbox slightly-
            smaller-than-the-microwave is

just about the vista we can
manage, let’s agree to call it history, let’s

imagine we had somehow seen its face
            in time. But where

in all of Kraków is
the mother who buttoned her coat?

A city steeped in harm-to-come,
            the film stock drained

to gray. The sturdy
threading-forward of a child who

might be panicked by the crowd but
            has her mind now on

a hiding place. Our
childlike conviction that she shall be

spared. Mistake that brings
            the lesson home: we lack

Chalk mark on a clouded screen.


But what was it like, his dying?
            It was like

a distillation.
You had morphine? We had

morphine, but he couldn’t use
            the bed. The bed?__

His lungs were so
thickened with tumors and phlegm

he had no way of breathing there.
            You’d rented the bed?

He climbed down beside it
and asked for his tools. When something

was broken he fixed it, that had
            always been the way with him.

So then . . . We left him in his
chair. But as the day went on we thought

he needed bedding so we tried to
            lift him. That’s the once

he blamed us. That’s
the look you meant. The why-

            the where-is-your-sense-

of-shame. I will
remember it until I die myself.

You meant well. Meaning well
            was not enough.

We meant that he
should know this wasn’t lost on us.

The urn that holds his ashes does
            a better job.


Sister partridge, brother hare.
            The linen on the table

with its hemstitch. I
have read the books on pridefulness:

the bounty of game park and sideboard
            and loom, the ships

that brought the lemon trees,
the leisure that masters the view. But

I have come to think
            the argument-by-likeness makes

a simpler point. The lemon,
for example, where the knife has been:

the pores, the pith, the luminescent
            heart of it, each differential

boundary bound to open.
Meaning death, of course, the un-

protected flesh about to turn, but just
            before the turn, while looking

can still be an act of praise.
I see you in the mirror every morning

where you wait for me. The linen,
            Father, lemon, knife,

the pewter with its lovely
reluctance to shine. As though

the given world had given us
            a second chance.