It is about a pink dress.
About the drape of one leg over another on a bar stool, two hands clasping
an icy Campari.
It is about the ear of a man and what he hears.
The mouth of that woman and what she says.
Her throat: that silk roadway along which her words, drenched with bitters, race north.
The ear of another man who flew over Scotland became enlarged, so that this
was all there was of him.
This, the only part of him to bury after his Bristol Beaufighter was bombed,
the organ into which he crawled after he’d heard your words spoken to a lover.
Into that pink ear he crawled, curving, incurving like the down-going spiral of his Beau
as it vanished into water.
Above Scotland he saw the trawlers off the coast.
The loose net I threw into the sea caught a fin of his grief.
You trawled in these waters, Mother,
a skilled thrower of nets.
Not much you do not want comes up and therefore goes to waste.
I will not go out with you on the coast of Scotland and stand in some
1945 wind to commemorate the end, when you, in Brooklyn, saw so little
of the war.
You, at your toy piano, your Polish mother, my grandmother, Esther,
seven days a week in a sweat shop,
sewer of seams, dresses ladies like you’d become would wear uptown, downtown,
on Flatbush Avenue, on Coney Island.
The hem of your pink dress, though cut and raised through the years,
is still a tidal wave rolling across the world.