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The Liftings
and the Fallings.
BY JONAH WINTER
- - - -
Grandmother, how I long once more in the gloaming
to hear your voice. Voicelessly, it speaks
in whispered sighs, the wind: statelessness.
With each daguerreotype I touch, a shroud
of darkness falls. I recall the breast pump
you gave me, how we gazed at the wainscoting
together, listening, how the wainscoting
echoed, a halcyon of sound, how the gloaming
enveloped the liftings and the fallings of the breast pump,
its capacious stillness immeasurable now. It speaks
to me in a voice I cannot hear, through a shroud
of silhouettes, bracken, statelessness.
Revenant, appear! Your statelessness
malingers in the chiffonier, the wainscoting's
absence, in the veil of dreams, the shroud
of sleep, the sidewalk of meaning, in the gloaming
of hunger, the chifforobe of chance ... One speaks
of incandescence, of what is needed, of breast pumps,
of fields which are no longer. Your breast pump
murmuring cantilevered statelessness
quells each ceaseless passerby, speaks
the language of grief, recombinant—such wainscoting
was not easy, such corridors—in the gloaming
of our hearts, as once they were, this shroud
forever flowering. Osterlind, our shroud,
undreams the unknowable. Breast pumps,
two fluttering ghosts, dreamless, undo the gloaming
in the leaves of dawn. Such statelessness
was not easy. With tenderness, the wainscoting
sings a song that you used to sing, speaks
with your voice, Grandmother. Persephone speaks
through you, in a tremolo: loud shroud.
Wrong song, for now, my heart demures ... The wainscoting
fades. The day is ended. Lost are the breast pumps
of sunlight. All is gone. All is statelessness,
ruin. I sit alone, in the after-gloaming ...
And yet, in this post-gloaming, something speaks
to me of statelessness, then lifts the shroud
from my eyes: your breast pumps hang from the wainscoting.
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