FIGURE OF WOMAN COMING OUT OF A WALL

& so it is, having slain the dragon Winter, I come to walk

the herringbone floorboards & the wet stairs of a nursing home

out to the hall. Every day for a month I’ve said the words He left me.

At a wedding where I was happy for the couple, I declined to give the toast.

I took his namecard from the table & told myself it wasn’t stealing—

that this name I loved belonged to me. At least.

Through the window of the nursing home, I can see the gutter dripping.

I stand taller than the wingspan of a heron to suggest I’m an arrow. Which I point.

My grandmother, my namesake, doesn’t always remember our name.

Can you say how old you are I ask & she says Yes. December.

What she remembers as clear as yesterday is 1931,

standing on the back porch of the house on Roscoe with her five siblings

watching their father burn down the garage for the insurance money.

I’m learning how to speak to her as if she could be any age.

She thinks it’s my aunt’s birthday, that we have eaten gołtumpki

& set out the cake knife & we’re waiting for my grandpa, dead in 1987,

to rummage through the cabinets for the good floral plates.

An old man in a wheelchair pulls himself by his feet along the corridor

of Polish last names & he says to me What’s your name, little girl

& I push through the door to stand out in the yard.

Things are supposed to be fine now, because March

has melted five blizzards down to floods, has shown the cold no mercy.

Coarse sleet is evicted, rainwater is raising blue tin in my veins

but I stand by a birch tree determined to speak—

I have practiced the clock tongue. Years are erasing. This

is how time passes: my grandmother falls, Winter. He doesn’t come back

for me, Winter. What was it the settlers expected

when they night-rowed their way up this flooded black river—

was it, friends, the same bullshit? Again & again that law

of starting over: spring anyway. So spring. I know that story.

I’ve been holding my own arms up & I can’t remember why.

There’s a parquet star on the floor. The moon is losing blood.

When I cradle the skull of a vulture to my cheek, I remember

how once I was near-bride at the not-altar, how she sewed me a blue marriage quilt

& a dress, how I practiced holding up my face to his, certain—

because I thought saying Yes first was the point.

ELEGY WITH RABBITS