VII

Such newsreels flicker still. His mother in a crowd
shawled soot-dark and frail. The roped-off ledge
of a dour steel bridge; ten thousand blazing throats and the stretch

of girders toward a stinking canal. His chained ankles
flickering; then his shrug to her, shy, as if rising
dully from some couch or half-eaten lunch to step but a moment out

when he plunges. The wet thump of flashbulbs flaring the river,
rail, sunlight, his grey flesh gone in that lazy wash of foam;
crowds jostling in, hushed; a shadow ripples the water —

but true suffering is an art like any art; it must be learned.
In a peeling kitchen in Appleton a child's knees grind
the lip of a tub, his knuckle crooks the shy hairless fish
of his sex,

he grins Ma look at this!, scrunches his nose: is gone.
Heels farting the washtub walls. Hair strangling the oily surface.
She hears it still: her old chair rasping back, that flat skitter

of peeler and skin and potato meat across the floor,
in her ears the fast plaited river of Budapest, of girlhood
and quick as a gasp she is up, crying Nein, nein Ehrich —

His nose blowing careful air and him pausing
beneath the gurgling pockets of breath just long enough
to draw out the awe in her dark face.