Index + The Tower + As Above - So Below + Soul Food + Enlightenment + Prologues + Bio's


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 childhood 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


in his window (there is no window) when rescue
approaches, he speaks of Chopin, Chopin.

They cut off his hands, nurses say he is "doing OK"
-in my dream: he stands, feeding bread to pigeons,
surrounded

by pigeons, birds on his head, his shoulder,
he shouts You don't understand a thing! he is

breathing himself to sleep, the city sleeps,
there is no such city.



                                     Ilya Kaminsky
                                                USA/Russia