kitchen language

iced-cherries in the cold, belgravia, dec. 23, 2008.

kitchen language

heard your voice again, babusya,
as i woke in winter lightlessness;
you crept like sticky apricot footsteps
on the cobbled linoleum, bare feet
slipping warm into the morning.

how i once grew in the thick stirrings
of your kasha accent, the butter-on-toast
of your kitchen language; it came through
the cracks in a krashanka, nourishing yolk
on hungry ears.

been three years now, but you are still
singing to me. i hear you move between
the shifting frequencies of memory,
trailing apron strings, your lilt still a morsel
of sweet almonds & milk –

do you remember the taste of it?
or is it something like the food we eat
in dreams?

but i cook now, baba. i roast beets & scoop
onions into the pan, stain my fingers rosy
& pinch the leaves of sour cabbage. i pile
the bowls high & swear psha krev when i
i slice my finger, sing

your songs to the girl with the accordion,
whisper them coyly to my lover’s ears –

i’ve set a place for you on the poppy-seed
dishes, & i can say these words back to you
now, scatter them like kernels of buckwheat
flung to the frost & the soft blue dirt
of the horizon:

i’ll bake them well into myself, drip
them like honeyed amber onto the plates of
others – alive in me so that i might still
feed you, living now in the whole
earth’s mouth.