Dress me in the tatters of a falling star and throw
me higher than the rusty trampoline
so I might kiss the sun as it glides home
from this work-a-dog-day world
where bones are cracked;
so I may play piano, train my chords
to sing the English that you never learned,
the Dutch you’ve long forgotten.
(Do this, though I am four and fragile
and do not want to be grabbed like the eggs and meat
your father threw from Hitler’s trucks
into Holland’s mouths,
all sparrow-bone and heartbeat.)
Dress me in the tatters of a falling star and catch
me in your peeling hands; beneath my arms,
where my heart quakes
in this wicker work of cartilage. Do this,
and I will sing though the song is unfamiliar,
a robin’s note in trembling December.
Not like the hearty Dutch songs Opa sings
embarrassing and loud as an old man’s poot.
(Do this, though you once told me
wide-eyed with three a.m. that you saw
a German lying on the road, his brown shirt
stained with mud and maggot eggs.
Still a child
you innocently kicked him. His head
rolled backwards like a rotting grape,
and you still dream of him).
Dress me in the tatters of a falling star and shake
me until my eyes pop a garnet SOS.
For your own good, you say. You carve a line
around my final rib reminding me
the rarity of soap, the price of water,
the cost of spitting them upon the floor
when they cloud my eyes as your hands
rake too-long hair in desperation.
You liked saving money, after all.
(Do this though you despise
the old Dutch man who left
a thumbprint at your spine’s base,
the eternal watchman, the dark spot on your lungs).
Dress me in the tatters of a falling star and stain
my feet with Lysol, Windex,
things you never had, and throw me on
this foreign soil. It’s better here, they say.
The sand is clean, and when we die
our bodies may dry out. The ground is warm
and rocky, it can’t hold the blood
that runs, thick-veined in Europe’s bloated coil.
(Do this, though you’ve said so many times
your child would never see the tiger’s tail wrapped
around your guts or hear the rifle
cocked against your temples.)
Dress me in the tatters of a falling star and tell
me, once, twice, three times, that I’m not you.
I speak a new language. I know new secrets.
And when my child is born I will not wrap him
in my apron as you were. I will not be
crushed beneath the panzers, prone in a ditch
bicycle wrapped around my spinning brain.
(Do this, though your initials
are carved deep, and I
sometimes wake at night with your blood
pounding in my ears, a drum a drum.
The stars will fall like gunfire
and I am here and rotting in the ditch
my mouth smashed in with flies.)