Riddle
—after Nicolás Alcalá
The chair is not far from the bed
as if the bed were a table
over which the dead live
and hesitate like pods in a red tree
lifting above the mountain stream; it whispers
from the throat of the tree,
the pods like clay
rattling in snow and wind.
There’s something about the chair
being too near to the bed, both
are prodigy to the rubber sheet, a
black alluvial scree on the hospital floor
there in St. Petersburg. The woman
was the mother of the feathered priest,
she turned her head
away from the bread
with specks of limestone glistening
in her hair—
the table lifts with us
above the trees that are white now
in an alkaline field,
the bar of soap on the windowsill
is green
like the throat of the pigeon
who also sleeps in the wet vellum street…
Up in the darker loft there are life-sized dolls
made of cornhusk, it is now
that the dead cosmonaut’s mother points
with a finger in the direction of the cold
blue wash of clouds,
her memory turning adamantine,
five lustrous fat wolves
dragging a small deer along a distant treeline.
