from Part 4
1942
To seize and put into words, to describe directly
the life of humanity or even of a single nation,
appears impossible.
— Lev Tolstoy
So it’s just me in the back room with pneumonia.
The insurance man in the kitchen asking
father when exactly the old man stepped off
the curb in front of the truck father was driving
for City Electric, how the body flew and the man’s
banged head made the sound of rock on rock,
my chest gurgling, while Hitler’s armies
have crossed Napoleon’s line of advance
in two places, lungs locked in the Soviet cold
everywhere, even in my parents’ small bedroom
when father awakes alarmed at the shadow that
is not there crossing the doorway, a fear
that is the famine of besieged cities
eating his years to come,
the old man forever sliding out on the morgue drawer,
a neatly stitched “Y” the way war
and traffic on a gray morning are sewn
into history, where loss repeats itself
while a father sits alone at a table, holding
his head, incalculable noise in the streets,
because there is really only the person,
the one person, over and over again
trying to breathe.