Birthday

A warden of the stars releases a bit of light.

It arrives in the distant whining of an ambulance,

in the morning’s groceries spilled on the floor,

after you carried your body up the stairs all by yourself.

You are screaming among the oranges.

A child slow to learn, I still hardly understand

doorbells or calendars,

a disassembled mechanism where for a moment our breath

died completely, before flaring up again like a lovesick suitor

at the open window of the world.

That was me singing.

What did you make of us among the truant angels?

A new configuration of the eternal and the infinitely sad.

Like moving a table from one corner

of the room to another, except being both Muslims and Jews,

these transitions are more or less impossible to explain.

My soft bones and organs sustained by a few drops of milk

and kindness. Efficient nurses

laid me on a scale, smiled at my sex. For a handful

of shekels, they hired a band of Bacchantes

to beat their chests at the hospital gates

in praise to the generous void

to the woman who delivered the flower of its violence.

I’m just glad someone took down our names.

On a real piece of paper. Folding it into your pocket,

so that we’d know how to refer

to ourselves later, and the world, what happened.

Nothing was the same in the city of Vienna.

Shapeless, I laid on your chest,

and cried without thinking, inconsolably—

my first lesson on possessing

flesh and a soul simultaneously.