after Danusha Lameris
There was that morning we drove past stone gates into Strážnice,
the green Skoda’s muffler ready to drop,
me leaning out the window to take pictures,
the Kodak hanging from my wrist on its strap.
We wound through narrow streets past patchy gardens, common-wall houses,
doors,
each its own color, lace curtains waving past sills nested with potted plants,
smiled at the old man on a bicycle wheeling beside us, his market bag stuffed
with corn,
asked him to point the way to No.27. Across an ocean
friends fought with their parents about Vietnam,
Johnson was waging his own war.
Blue and white fresco swirls above the door like strips of icing that would
never melt,
Uncle scanned my face with a surgeon’s eye when he answered, squeezed me
breathless,
pulled us past the rooms my father had left. I crossed to where she sat in a
corner
but couldn’t take the bony hand. Skin stretched over her skull like thin
wrapping.
I’d never seen anyone that old. Death was a woman in a worn sweater and long
brown skirt.
And I was supposed to kiss her.
I studied the pink dahlia’s that grew in the yard when we left.
Turned to take one more picture.
