Set It Gently

The delicate imbalance of your life,
a dying cowskin rug on pre-war hardwood,
your mattress on the floor, my feet in your shoes,
Le Sex-Appeal De L’Inorganique,
spine fraying, next to my ear, half-resting,
skin bare-stript, heart
up-tempo, your body that howled as it slept.

The balance, the dance
of your life, your wired hair
graying at the age of twenty four,
a pomegranate shriveled, centered
on chipped pyrex, amaranth,
I see it. The mildewed rags,
the life support beneath your kitchen sink.

My feet in your shoes, rip
the nail from my finger, use my teeth.
Set it fall from out my lips,
See it. A tangerine
in your bedroom that never spoiled,
in the four months I knew you.
Who will remember me that way?

Heritage

In Rome there is a portrait of a girl,
a figure pulled from a collage you made.
Her smile is yours, her eyelids gayly furled
up toward her temples. The gallery played
a klezmer song like ones I used to hear
in your apartment when I was a kid.
I turn my head, a dress is hanging near
the portrait, with the jewelry she hid.

We saw the horses in Vienna slow
enough to bore me. They stared back at us.
They did not seem to mind the falling snow
That peppered your gray hair in ashy tufts.

Write a sonnet for your grandmother.
Leeks and liver, simmer and smother.