Meditações - de Abril, para Maio

April to May

1.

It is cold enough for rain

to coagulate and fall in heavy drops.

Tonight a skin of ice will grow

over the bones of the smallest bush,

 

making it droop like the wrist

of someone carrying a heavy suitcase. This moving on,

from season to season, is exhausting

and violent, the break from the Berlin Wall

 

of winter especially. Like a frostbitten

hand coming to life, I color

first with warmth,

then with pain. Thawing, letting

 

the great powers go

their own way, in rivers and in flesh,

frightens me, as this day

warns me of an icy night.

 

2.

Each year I am astonished

at the havoc wrought

on other lives: fathers

made tiny by cancer;

 

a mother swollen around

a bad heart "brought on by aggravation."

To suffer is to do something new

yet always the same—

 

a change of life

from the sexual dread. Some women

wish they were men, some men

wish they were dead; still,

 

there is coin in suffering . . .

It makes us rich

as Croesus in his golden tears,

and we are rarely hated for it.

 

This coin I store in a purse

made of my mother's

milk and flesh, which God says I must not mix.

I use it instead to seek pleasure.

 

3.

Walking around with this thing in me

all day, this loving cup

full of jelly, waiting for you

to come home—seven o'clock,

 

eight o'clock, eight-thirty . . .

What could be more important

than love? I can't imagine; you can.

Not a good day, not about to get better.

 

4.

The bird comes complete

with heart, liver, and neck-bone

wrapped chastely in white paper.

Still half-frozen,

 

the legs are hard to separate.

Inside, wax paper sticks to the ribs.

I reach like a vet delivering pigs,

or a boy finger-fucking a virgin.

 

5.

Air the same sweet

temperature inside the house

as outside the house.

Stepping up from the cellar

 

with an armful of sheets,

I listen for the dirge of flies

under the chittering birds,

both painfully loud. There is a stridency

 

that's stubborn in a life

grown by inches: the fat

little fingers of buds bursting;

ugly ducklings; the slow war

 

of day against night.

As I pin the swelling sheets

with clothespins damp and too

narrow at the mouth, I wonder how

 

flies know to come out

to feed the birds, and feast themselves

on the new stillborn, this stubborn

great chain of being.

Joyce Peseroff