Letter To My Grandfather

1.
In that blue-flourescent hospital room,
room with no shadows
and one round mirror,
I stood as rigid as the dry synapses
of Alzheimer's in my grandfather's brain.
And while he talked in childish fragments,
as if I was his father,
I had no voice to answer.

I used to pretend my finger
was a schooner, sailing the channels
on his face. Troughs
of giant storm swells.
He said I knew my way
around his eyes, cheeks, nose,
better than he did,
but I should still make a map
in case one of us got lost.
Then he'd laugh
and without raising his eyebrows
make his big ears wiggle
like and elephant trying to fly.

2.
A little bite like this, you'd say,
after every large dinner,
is better than one of those
big meals, any day.

Those big meals once
were cabbage soup
or borscht, spice with phrases

you didn't understand,
your parents allowing you
only English, while
in coded Russian whispers
they buried the names, the places,
the village they fled,
in that unlearned language
on the ship where you were born.

Your nusery slid humbly past
that huge woman in the harbor,
that woman crowned
with long-bladed thorns,
not a queen or czarina
a thief, who blinded you
with her torch
while she stole my History.

3.
Now, my son traces under my eyes
lines curved like glasses. I say
I wear them to look for lost sleep.
He askes about the grid of tiny squares
at the corders of my eyes
from squinting too long at ocean glare.
I tell him I have tried too often
to see the curve over the horizon.
I tell him they are all part of a map
his great-grandfather left him
and we both have a section of it on our faces.
I tell him It leads back
to somewhere in Russia.