My Grandfather’s Art

There is a chorus, a calamity

in the kitchen: clanging pans cry

like church bells, a cathedral,

like the empty paths along that darkening river.

Paintings and photographs

litter the walls, mute –

Vibrant. Untranslatable. Outside

the window, almost buried by a rush

of water, a bird reminds him that he is

as alone now as he was at seven,

that any creature with a voice cannot live

forever trapped in a coffin of rain;

that the riverbanks have always been crowded.

***

Did the old man ever believe

in the one language he spoke well?

Languid charcoal smudges, hurried inkings

on butcher paper, a swath of cerulean oils.

At night he would whisper alone with his brushes,

in the simplest tongue he knew.

They say the soul collapses at a moment like this,

he’d whisper, that the boat is flat-bottomed, that

gold coins cover your eyes.

***

1936.

Splattered with paint, he rests on a rooftop.

he watches the city struggle

for breath in this aestival heat.

Below, a river. A thin line

of barefoot laborers at lunch.

A peregrine’s shadow is

as large as he is frightened.

A storm moves upriver.

The laborers slip on their shoes.

***

When he died, there was no chorus, no calamity.

There was no bird outside the window, no rain.

On the walls were paintings and photographs.

They say that the soul collapses at moments like these,

and stays small. They say that the boat is flat-bottomed,

that gold coins cover your eyes. That when you arrive,

finally, you will know how to love.

That you will stand alone

on the crowded riverbank and wait –

Vibrant. Untranslatable.