Alice Shapiro
THE STORY
by Margo Berdeshevsky
To learn how to die, watch cherry blossoms, observe chrysanthemums.
—
Anonymous, 1700
While the horned cow tethered in her yard is walked to a shoveled pit,
her throat slit for a week's meat, blood hissing in what the knife has opened
for that song—the village boys applaud—
The wind has no passport, knows no border, nor a sky that is not land.
The sea knows not its border either, hungry as a village statue for
a fresh and red hibiscus dutifully placed, behind a carved stone ear.
Was it hunger, I ask. Awake and asleep in the silt nights, I try to float
in the sea of souls. But that is not a comfort. Water is for washing away
a tropic sweat at the equator's fence, but the sea?
This is the story : It is noon. A man grabs his wife—drops
everything, takes nothing. Come. And he guns their jeep only
inches ahead of the second and the third and fourth black wave-
rising—the slower car behind them lost, in greedy water.
The man knows he must turn right, up the next tight road and grab his
mother, save his mother. A bag-
front of him, bent, and slowing his escape, his engine seething, he
jumps out, grasps her body, throws her in back of his mother-
and guns right. Not that way, go left, the woman storms. But no—my
mother—Your mother will be all right, turn left, turn left up this hill
she screams, or you will die.
By then the desperate ones cling to his car and shout Left, Go left, Go
up. Surrounded, he succumbs And turns. While water behind his spine
swells blood and floods—It drowns all that is to the right. And he drives
higher, to the highest point the road will carry. There, the old woman
clambers out and vanishes. And there is his mother, already on high
ground, and all in her street where he had wanted to go, gone with
the ravenous Indian sea that could be any ocean next, suppose.
Every year is the most terrible. A sun. A red breeze. A humming teen-
boy's favorite music in the tongue of the most powerful voices on the earth,
at his pillow. Near a window, near another tethered cow, near a wide-
moon. Any wave is the sea of souls. Any soul its captive beloved.
—Sumatra tsunami, December 26, 2004—
From "But A Passage in Wilderness" (Sheep Meadow Press/2007) Copyright © 2006, 2007, 2008 by Margo Berdeshevsky
Poems nominated by Marilyn Hacker for Pushcart Prize 2007, The Story, & After The
End After the Beginning (from "But A Passage in Wilderness," Sheep Meadow Press/2007;)
& also published in "Poetry International" in 2006. http://www.redroom.com/author/margo-
All poems © copyright by the author.. Audio files copyright © by The Change Interviews. Reproduction or distribution of poem text or audio without written permission from the author or from The Change Interviews is prohibited.