From The book, keeper of accounts by Irena klepfisz

...yet she was all 

My comfort: her sharp

Ribs against my cheek

Her body fingers rough

In fluffing me dry. 

She showed me all 

The space the changing 

Colors outside then

Pulled me back forced

Me to sit with her

In a shadowy corner. 

On certain clear days

She's shrug hold me in the sun:

Her fur lacked smoothness

Her body warmth. 

Today was my day for feeling envy. I envied every person who did not have to do what I had to do. I envied every person who was rich or even had $.25 more than me or worked one hour less. I envied every person who had a different job even though I didn't want any of them either. I envied poor homeless children wandering the streets because they were little and didn't know the difference or so I told myself. And I envied the receptionist who'd been there for years and years and years and is going to retire soon her hearing impaired from the headpiece she'd once been forced to wear. For her it was over. She was getting out. I envied her so much today. 

I wanted to be old.

Our words deny the simple beauty 

the wild energy of the event. Anomaly deviant mutant we're always taught 

as though this world were a finished place 

and we the dull guardians of it's perfected forms.  

our lives are rooted in such words. 

The train begins to move. My mother sits behind the tinted glass and waves. Her face becomes an angle and then disappears. Her words were: "Find a place where you are happy." But the sounds of those words had the mourning of separation. 

 

I ride the back roads far from any village or town far from the blacktops would along side suddenly by and a trailer cleared land. Logic would say ability to cinderblocks and able to keep it to the ground. Yet the obvious rust creeping along outershell reveal a hard One permanent. Barefoot children stop in front of a torn screen door stand anxious tentative waiting for the unfamiliar car to pass. A woman's eyes keep guard at a kitchen window. Plastic deer and clay ducks line the worn path. Junk cars spill out of the collapsed garage. Gray overalls and bright sheets with Sunset Drive between two shade trees. In a carved out tractor tire painted red and white grow yellow marigolds blue petunias. And order the vegetable garden on one side there's piles of freshly split logs on the other testified to the end placeable needs of winter. All is urgency asymmetry in this territory resistant to maps and philosophy. Only the seasons and birth and death remain stark. I know I see I learn again from anxiety and that woman's eyes in the caution of the children stance that there is no escape.

My mother is sick. Goiter. Malnutrition. Vitamin deficiencies. She has skin Aires which she cannot cure. For months now she has been living in complete isolation, with no point of reference outside of herself. She has been her own soul advisor, companion, comforter. Almost everyone of her world is dead: three sisters, nephews and nieces, her mother, her husband, her in-laws. All gone. Even the remnants of the resistance, those few left after the uprising, have disbursed into the Polish countryside. She is more alone then she could have ever imagined. Only she knows her real name and she is perhaps dying. She is 30 years old.