BUT I HADN’T SEEN THE MEADOWS YET

for my father, and for Łukasz

Wherever I walked I thought I felt your bones beneath the earth. “The graves are everywhere,” said my friend. But I hadn’t seen the meadows yet. When I climbed the hill that day, there was only high grass, yellowed, sour, only gray sky made more gray by clouds of chimney smoke and mist. My poor shoes sinking in the mud, my thin coat damp, my two hands numb. My friend who walked beside me naming each tree and ragged bush. This was the place from which we’d come, you’d told me once, and so I’d come. But if I’d hoped I’d hear you calling, all I heard that day were birds. All I smelled was burning wood, my own unwashed body, rain. And nothing knew me there, and I didn’t know myself. The path uphill was sodden, slippery — in fact, there was no path — but I turned and stood hard in that green, and the way back down was easier.  My breath going forth before me, and my shadow on that earth.

WHO WAS ALSO KNOWN AS LAVERNE

I heard the rain begin and thought at first that it sounded like fire. I thought I heard the voice of someone passing in the dark. But everyone’s sorrow is the same, I think, and everyone’s loneliness. There’s that voice again, or several voices, drizzling through the mist. A window opened at 2 a.m. A siren’s wail. The dearth of birds. Tomorrow, the world won’t end, I guess —my mother always said, “It’s not the end of the world, you know.” I miss her, still: the too-quick way she moved from room to room; her crooked hands that have become my crooked hands; her face that turns toward me in the mirror, my face, now. As if she hadn’t passed away but simply slipped inside my life. So, I won’t make anything new, but I might make some old things shine. Whatever hasn’t been lost for good, whatever hasn’t turned to mud. The rain falls through the leaves and sounds like flickering, like flames. The voices become the sky, that dark and full of missing birds. Oh, trade me for a better daughter, Mother, one you’d choose. But no— it’s a woman’s voice, a youngish voice, now wet with sky, now gone. I once stuck flowers onto a board with tar to make a gift for her. But then there was tar on my hands, my knees, and it had to be scrubbed off. “It wouldn’t kill you,” she liked to say. It wouldn’t kill me to be kind. So, close the window, go to bed. The flower of my mother’s name, green weed, sticks in my throat