Window 109 by Anna Gille
Valzhyna Mort
Psalm 18
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I pray to the trees and language migrates down my legs like mute cattle.
I pray to the wooden meat that never left its roots.
I, too, am meat braided into a string of thought.
I pray to the trees:
luminescent in the dark garden
is the square star
of a window frame, my old bedroom.
Ghosts, my teachers!
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In the branches of lindens – breathe, my ghosts,
(blood in my ears!),
in the lindens – cheekbones, elbows
of my dead – in these green mirrors.
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How could it be that I’m from this Earth,
yet trees are also from this Earth?
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A laundry line sagged under bedding among weightless trees,
yarrow and burdock, Bach’s fugue, Bach’s silence on our
wet clean sheets.
Behind glass – portraits of the dead.
*
Close the curtains – motionless, they watch.
Open the curtains – they tremble.
Close the curtains – speechless, they watch.
Open the curtains – they whisper.
Trees, curtains – tremble.
On them
the dead wipe this prayer off their tongues.