First Asthma

I must have been no more than six
or seven that autumn afternoon

because we left that town
by the time I was eight.

Two taxidermists. Twins.
The house was cut back from the road.

The forking dirt paths strewn
with bits of straw and wire led to the sheds

where the taxidermists divvied up their spoils~
a refrigerator shed and a shed

where the wooden bolt was not locked.
The padlock on the one shed door

I came back to and back to
hung like an anchor on a chain.

~ 

Not a blade of grass on their land.
The walls of the sunken living room crawled

with the black sad beaks of the ducks
craning their necks on twining hooks and platforms,

the indelible black-green of their feathers,
the same black-green as the dull flannel

shirts the taxidermists wore tromping though the maze
of their grounds, never crossing paths.

They moved with the heaviness of figures in a dream.
I couldn’t imagine them taking off their clothes,

or without the dust caked on their skin.
The smell comes back. No name for it.

~

We had gone to see the taxidermists’ father.
His name was Happy.

His right hand fidgeted with his hearing aid~
as if dredging up signals from the underworld.

As everyone yelled into his ears Hap looks baffled,
but "happy," like a dog or a child.

The taxidermists’ Weimaraners herded us in, circling.
They rubbed against me without affection.

~

Hap’s grandson exploded onto the scene in a dust cloud,
wet black hair combed down over his broad forehead.

He swallowed ice like water.
He drank his afternoon’s ration of M & M’s in one gulp.

I held onto mine, sucking one at a time.
He picked an unharvested ear of corn and gnawed the cob.

He ignored the splinters we picked up hauling planks.
I hesitated. He acted. I wanted to like him.

I’d overheard that his mother had just remarried
out of her faith, and that as soon as his chores were over

he’d return to her. As we replaced the scarecrow’s vest
he spoke for the first time: "I’m not a Jew anymore.

I’m a Lutheran now. It’s settled."
Was this the unseen source of his liberation?

~

When I looked back at the porch Hap was scowling.
His rage silenced the fields and plains,

the clouds stopped in the thick blue air,
the sun went out.

I zipped my jacket against the chill
but that only made it colder.

The moon’s lip stuck at the horizon,
but there was no horizon.

Fields dipped and rolled,
studded with dry mounds like camels’ humps.

I was other, and alone~
desperate for the fields to stop going on

with no purpose.
I remember running toward some mounds

like sand hills, hard-caked dirt
that wouldn’t slosh down after rain~

it would take a flood.
I crouched to watch the goings on~

the songless indifferent hum of the landscape,
the ferocious dry rattling of the cornstalks,

the crows whose shadows pooled on the ground
after their bodies had risen, the sun, which

never again appeared that day, the eyes
that were the only sign of a soul I could see…

I tried to hear where the hum was coming from
and, kneeling between the anonymous stalks,

I thought my ear was cusped at the source of the sound,
the joy a slow and steady rising,

a lightness in the wind’s song I knew could last
for as long as I stayed

out of doors, where things were not bereft, and fixed
beyond imagining.

~

Torn open animals stunned on shelves.
Litter of screens, bottles of dye.

Inside, Hap’s wife Maggie
asks what I want to play.

I say, "Gin Rummy."
My mother looked so lovely

as, balanced on the porch rail,
she shifted in her shawl.

~

I remember everything about the day
except no breathing, except

the story of my tense heaving chest,
I, who have apprenticed myself to origins.

Published in The New Yorker