Letter to My Grandfather

1.
In that blue–fluorescent hospital room,
room with no shadows
and one round mirror,
I stood as rigid as the dry synapses
of Alzheimer’s in my grandfather’s brain.
And while he talked in childish fragments,
as if I was his father,
I had no voice to answer.

I used to pretend my finger
was a schooner,
sailing the channels
of his face through troughs
of giant storm swells.
He said I knew my way
around his eyes, cheeks, nose,
better than he did,
but I should still make a map
in case one of us got lost.
Then he’d laugh
and without raising his eyebrows,
make his big ears wiggle
like an elephant trying to fly.

2.
A little bite like this, you’d say,
after every large dinner,
is better than one of those
big meals, any day.
Those big meals once
were cabbage soup
or borscht, spiced with phrases
you didn’t understand,
your parents allowing you
only English, while,
in coded Russian whispers,
they buried all the old names,
the places, the village they fled,
in that unlearned language
on that ship
where you were born.

Your nursery slid humbly past
that huge woman in the harbor,
that woman crowned
with long-bladed thorns,
not a queen or czarina,
but a thief, who blinded them
with her torch
while she stole my history.

3.
Now, my son traces under my eyes
lines curved like glasses.
I say I wear them
to look for lost sleep.
He asks about the grid of tiny squares
at the corners of my eyes
from squinting too long
at ocean glare.
I tell him I have tried too often
to see the curve over the horizon.
I tell him they are all part of a map
his great-grandfather left him
and we both have a section of it
imprinted on our faces.
I tell him it leads back
to somewhere in Russia.