Two Poems by Valzhyna Mort

Cenotaph

In a chance encounter, a stranger who knew you in your Mordovian evacuation, described the horrible hunger, and described you as a hungry boy who always carried a book.

1. 

On this table made of foreign trees
the bread of silence, unbroken.

Mute, a portrait of myself: I’m framed

into the back of the chair.  And you are here,
yet not. Your bones in the womb of the earth,
yet not, a hungry boy with a book, in a mass grave
next to your twins-in-death, your name,
that sounded foreign to them,
is changed for a Russian name
in an act of un-baptism.
Yet, not.

The bread sits on the square wooden shoulders.

When you go hungry for months,
your heart is a red bone.

All I see when I open a book is your empty stomach.

2

Sometimes your empty stomach is a magnifying lens.
With it, I search from page to page
for an old potato dug into the soil of print.

I go so mad I listen to the pages of books
wondering if you chewed on the roots of trees
turned this paper.

Into my stomach-size fist
I fold a raisin, a walnut, some sugar.
With this fist I knock the air out of air,
strike whatever’s around.

About me: I often spent a whole day between parking lots
where cars resemble giant turtle shells abandoned by all life.
From these turtle cemeteries
                                          I watch hills—ophthalmic distortion,
                                          red barns—ants on my eye bulbs.

Doctor prescribed me drops of Lethe water.

Why do I speak to you?
Favorite grandchild of your favorite sister,
the more Lethe I put into my eyes, the closer I am to you.

Inside my Noah’s Arc—ghosts ready to beget ghosts.

Do you know what a ghost looks like?
It looks like blood.

3

Sitting a breath away from you, I’m afraid
of my tongue’s shadow move in the corners
of my mouth.

I pulled this house over my head like a cast
to heal fractured sanity, thought to thought.

I silenced all past by the spell of a camera flash,
yet not.

So,
if there’d be a sound between us,
let it be one that starts
with touch,
which is music.

Music that, over accordion keys,
unclenches the fist of ancestry,
loosens fingers into rose petals.  

Family tree is not a tree, but a rose bud,
petals tied together, mouths down.

In bed at night you listened for the sound
of an iron gate squeal like at slaughter
and licked your lips. Then, silence
straightened its shoulders inside your nostrils.

You died on a hospital sheet bleached
and starched until it seemed to be made
out of ironed bones.

What does the family rose think about that,
as my pen stands up like a hair on top of this paper?

From one hospital-white key to the next,
I carry my dead in order to tuck them into
these shrouds weaved out of sound.

I bury them, properly, one by one,
inside the piano key-coffins.

I rush – I learned to rush from the Earth!
Earth, a bladder full of dirt and snow.

Yet, not.

Psalm 18

1

I pray to the trees and language migrates down my legs like mute cattle.
I pray to the wooden meat that never left its roots.

I, too, am meat braided into a string of thought.
I pray to the trees:

luminescent in the dark garden
is the square star
of a window frame, my old bedroom.
Ghosts, my teachers!

In the branches of lindens – breathe, my ghosts,
(blood to my ears!),

in the lindens – cheekbones, elbows
of my dead – in these green mirrors.  

2

How could it be that I’m from this Earth,
yet trees are also from this Earth?

A laundry line sagged under bedding among weightless trees,
yarrow and burdock, Bach’s fugue, Bach’s silence on our
wet clean sheets.  

Fugure’s Bach turns in the keyhole of the Earth.
Behind glass portraits of the dead.

Close the curtains—motionless, they watch.
Open the curtains—they tremble.

Close the curtains—speechless, they watch.
Open the curtains—they whisper.

Trees, curtains—tremble.
On them
the dead wipe this prayer off their tongues.

3

At dusk, like eyesight, mint and dill
tense their smell. On a light curtain

wind polishes its bones.
Two beds along one wall,
where, head to head, we sleep.  

The grave of memory, grave
upon grave of memory: a train of coffin-wagons,
head-first, rushes, head-first
rushes, rushes, train upon train
arrive into the earth.

At the next stop: my ghosts, come out, take a breath,
I would be waiting there. I would bring
fresh dogrose tea in our Chinese thermos.

Valzhyna Mort is the author of Factory of Tears and Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press). She is a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Fellowship, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, Amy Clampitt fellowship, and a number of European fellowships. Born in Minsk, Belarus, she teaches at Cornell University.