My wife doesn’t want me to write about her superpower. The world should not know how she howls down the moon and turns an ordinary day into something the Hubble telescope might see from a billion years ago when the earth still steamed with cracks and fissures, when eukaryotes teemed and cells were strung together like glass beads. Of course, I say, I won’t tell about when we find a warm place on this first winter night and you  find me in my cave of covers pulled over my head reading Sappho and “Sonnets from the Portuguese” through fogged glasses—my grinding teeth trussed with my Oral-B mouthguard, or that you conjure, by merely sliding in beside me, the desire to sigh and imagine myself as a small god visiting from the mountains suddenly convinced that it’s better to be human and die than be a boundless body, incorruptible and shining like a golden calf in Sinai’s sun. And why would I tell of these things that so many know on this very night, when a billion lovers lie tangled, even those like me, whose rotting body’s wasting is so advanced that when I get up in the night to pee, I do dribble a bit and forget to put the toilet seat down, mistake the closet door for our bedroom, and slide to the floor and dream of sleeping alone.

she gasps —

my hands are

so cold

The blackberries that make it back to the house
are not the ones that have left inky stains
on my lips and tips of my fingers, not the ones
whose bunched drupelets are big
as thumbs, not the ones whose sepals
slide easy from the inner recess
of what makes blackberry blackberry.

The ones eaten under the beating sun –
warm as tongues – are like a drug that
makes a man forget his lover waits
at the door for her share, makes him
ignore thorn-ripped skin, makes
this one berry, and then this one berry
and then this one berry all that ever was.

1.

Everything I’ve told you is a lie—
the rape, my mother’s time under
the reeking Cossack, my father’s blood,

even what you see here, my gray
face, my swollen tongue—these
are not what they appear. Every

time I laughed, you thought it was
joy, but this is the way the marauders
taught us to cry, this is the way

your Zadie’s servant girl trained me
to lie with the old man, to turn his
sweating grunts into you.

When you tell your children
about me, tell them I was never scared,
that I said the blessings

every day, lit the candles like my mother
did, even when what was around me was
evil as Eden.

2.  

She took them from the pouch she wore
tucked between her breasts.  She said:
here are two jewels: One is the moon,

the other is you. Keep them from
the sun which will never be your
lover.  Bury them if you must

but make sure you have them with you
when you die.  Why? I don’t know
except my father told me.

3.  

She shuddered one more breath.
From her mouth fluttered a single
sheet of paper, on it written

four letters I did not know. I put
the paper under my tongue
so I could tell you this story
so you would never forget:

Hannele had four thousand
kin-sisters you will never know and each
died with a such a slip of paper under

her tongue, each scrawled
with a cypher
meant for me
to eat.