Zayda

My arms are still bare from disuse, I’ve not gotten them full of blood or dirt or children, as my zayda did, butcher of kosher kids and angel of them too. Beneath my shirt there are sprouts and sprouts of heavy burdens, like the curly bits on my chest, tiny gardens of age that twist against their source, a directional revealing a hidden wind, an accuser tracing a perpetrator with a finger.

Mine are another’s hands, they are limp in purpose like a violin’s cloth, the spent stubs of torn tickets, in short reach of the catstrings and trills.

Zayda’s tefillin clasp my prayers close to earth like kites on firmed leashes, his height in piety is length enough for double knots for mine, to protect my words from the carry-away gales.

In my mother’s pantry, his cherry vishnik rests for the mother of grandchildren -- my sister will have, I will not have – the first and only act of neglect toward her baby brother took place before he even arrived, Oh Elijah of the ureteral margins.

And now that I can’t, I want. I want his butcher block to cut tribulation against, for the marrow of it to be wrapped in scroll, taped by yad, boxed by his phylacteries, and buried like a dish disgraced. When it is excavated, soft flowers above the ceramic one, my son will be fed on the ethics of the fathers.