MAESTRO
What is memory? what makes a body glow:
an apple orchard in Moldova and the school is bombed
when the schools are bombed, sadness is forbidden
– I write this now and I feel my body’s weight:
the screaming girls, 347 voices
in the story of a doctor saving them, his hands
trapped under a wall, his granddaughter dying nearby –
she whispers I don’t want to die, I have eaten such apples,
he watches her mouth as a blind man reading lips
and yells: Shut up! I am near the window, I
am asking for help! speaking,
he cannot stop speaking, in the dark:
of Brahms, Chopin he speaks to them to calm them.
A doctor, yes, whatever window
framed his life, outside: tomatoes grew, clouds passed and we
once lived; a doctor with a tattoo of a parrot on his trapped arm,
seeing his granddaughter’s cheekbones
no longer her cheekbones, with surgical precision
stitches suffering and grace:
two days pass, he shouts
The evenings are my evidence, this evening
in which she dips her hands up to her elbows,
the evening is asleep inside her shoulder – her shoulder
rounded by sleep.