Karen Leeder

Strange, as a child he was always drawn to the inert.

In museums he’d stand for ages at the diorama,

its animals ranged in natural groups, stock-still

against the painted backdrops, forests, Himalayas.

Enchanted, as in a fairy tale, the deer pricked up

its ears as he edged closer in the neon, eyes shining.

In the skull of the caveman right next door he saw

only the gaping hole, couldn’t imagine the blow

of his rival’s club, the struggle for the fire.

The Egyptian mummy had lasted thousands of years
with its brain spooled out. Only with the melting
of the perma-ice had this mammoth come to light.
The most beautiful butterflies, big as your hand,
he found skewered with pins. Once he thought
he saw their wings still quivering—as if in memory
of the trees that had been felled, the tropical winds.
A draught, perhaps, had blown through the displays.

Ach Grandmother, always on the brink of tears—

When I was leaving, she would always clutch me

to her with the sudden strength of the drowning,

standing like a stick in her flowery apron.

And how bewildering, how quickly it all was gone,

the years of rose-growing, years at the sink.

She was so sprightly, the gossip, always so kind.

When she died, I was away, who knows where.

That Ach though, in fact any kind of sigh,

was cultivated in those circles of hers.

What circles? The ladies of the rummy club,

coffee together every Wednesday afternoon

Remembering ’45 she was filled with shame—

on account of the Russians, her liberators.

They’d battered down her door late one night.

The children, thank God, were in the country.

Those last days of the War remained sealed

within her for a lifetime, under lock and key,

like the bundle of letters downstairs in the dresser,

the flesh-coloured silks of the young bride.

Fifty long years the family secret held.

Not a single word, right until the end, then

in her last weeks of illness, she began to speak.

Grandmother, née Wachtel, from Silesia.

Wachtel, already a game bird in Goethe’s day.

At home the golden rule: it was never served.

And still today I find myself disturbed

when I see quail’s eggs prized as a delicacy.

Or a word on the breeze, that fragile syllable

that makes one tremble—it holds so much.

The conservation laws of language in action . . .

The same Ach in Wallach as in Kazakhstan.

Always on the brink of tears, I still hear her,

her sighs—the deep ones, fed up with life,

and those slight ones, carefully wrapped,

as if in tissue paper, between two small smiles.