How can it be?—that now
all
the scree
and the bold rubble
that your tough and immodest-
ly dead
grandmother ever was
to you—
an off-limits series
of dark carpeted
stiff rooms—plastic and overloaded
with huge oak
bowls of odd-
numbered and fluke-
shaped white-
striped penny candies—the vague hazel
stubborn reek of an indiscreet
liquor cabinet—littered always
with portraits,
with glossy poker chips, with that chipped amber
bust of Franz Liszt—the smell
of which was compounded
no less often—by the impressions
of about a hundred million
stuckon gummy savory
ghosts of some
much older country—fanning out from within
the dank and cramped
olive oil kitchen;
how can it be—that now
all
of these ponderous things
rise to your mind—so weightless-
ly quick and easily?
whenever
you so much as—glance down
at the dumb
blue vein now jutting
out from your own
rather stubborn—and
increasingly leathery hand.
