Likeness

COHORT 7

On the morning after

the rain, bäcken overflows my veins

like the white noise of summer.

This town is a sound

town, full of robotic lawnmowers

and the masts of sailboats toasting (skål!)

at each new breeze. A school of fåglar

ride the sky like a tide before

doubling back on themselves

as the ghost of Farfar—

far far, like birdsong—

watches.

The neighbors’ Swedish vimpel waves like a grin

unfurling on the face of my younger cousin.

I wish I could do more than

approximate, but reality and metaphor

are dangerous to conflate

nowadays. Left and right wings everywhere

have iterated fiction beyond flight

in the tainted name of truth.

In other words, translation lies in

and relies upon likeness.

(My far’s far’s likeness is engraved

in my far’s face for a moment.)

So much in this country is white noise—

like noise—that it becomes impossible

to listen, to isolate a single memory in order

to burnish it. Even so, making a present of the past

is how I like to fall asleep. It’s likely, I’ll confess,

that the white natives

help make the white noise white, for their tongues 

have always known

where to reach.

How drawn I am, moth-like,

to a nation that looks like a family

like mine, to a culture not based on

displacement. Mathematics tells us

that the fåglar are a chaotic

dynamical system, and in this way

they are like a brain

or a people. How is it then

that they manage to stick

like together?

At bedtime, tårar stream down

the face of my cousin, who looks

like Farfar also. Like the rest of us,

my cousin is afraid of sleep

and what it means for the mouth:

either a pink wound open

or a scar scabbed shut.

Lately, the dead man and his living country

have distanced themselves for good,

and maybe I love them better

for it. It looks like the vimpel

across the street, too, is settling

down for the night on its mast.

If I listen too hard or not hard

enough, there is no sound at all

anymore. But if the wind is right

in the Old-World blackness, I can still hear

bäcken spilling like language from one mouth

to another or like blod from a wound

into the sea, where real schools swim

and where Farfar’s ashes are

scattered, likely

in the bellies of mature kräftor in early August,

for safekeeping.