Читать книгу Maps - John Freeman - Страница 10
ОглавлениеLegend
My father’s father rode the rails
west into Grass Valley and buried three children
in the shadow of a tree that spread its arms around his bakery.
Cold nights he saw stars he didn’t
believe existed, and heard wild animals
howling with a loneliness he knew.
Wife dead, every morning
he woke to the bread and chill, horses
snuffling in the dark. He’d starved
before, in Canada, winter so ragged it
killed the dog, and this grief was that
feeling, shifted north into his chest.
The heart is not a diamond pressed down
into something hard like rock, but, rather, the word
my father’s father said to himself
those too-cold California nights when
all he could see was the work ahead of him,
the dead behind —
her name.
He’d say her name.
