She has been gone a long time,
thirteen years since her memory failed her
and her language became crumbs for the sparrows,
since she dangled her feet in the Danube and fed ducks
and gazed at the blooming chestnut in the Prater.
Six years since she roamed the green hallways
of the Memory Unit and stole fake pearls and photos
from the other residents’ rooms.
Two years since she walked hunched and unsteady
and skimmed her hands to the walls to keep from falling,
and two years of falling.

She was born in 1943 during the war,
when Nazis saluted their leader
and sullied the word for heal, heil,
when bombs tore through cities and wrenched
the skies of salvation, emptied stomachs
of all but fear.
In the spring of 1945 it ended,
a cold spring with hail,
and my mother toddled through the house
and sat on the Russian soldier’s lap,
who sang her songs and ran his fingers through her curls.
She grew despite her hunger.
She tasted foreign lands and languages.
She stretched herself across an earth
pocketed with bomb craters.

I empty the room of her belongings—
stale-smelling clothes, cards from friends
she was unable to read,
paintings of fruit and flowers
and portraits of my father and sisters
and me at eleven.
Her hairbrush is full of gray hair,
and I pull out the oily strands,
some as white as snow.
I think of white, the same as black,
that blank sheet on which we sketch,
in which we dream in the shadows,
the bluntness of death our backdrop, our curtain. 

I think how I will miss my mother,
how I’ve missed her for years.

Austria, 1946

I’m hungry all the time. 
We forage in the Alps for mushrooms and elderberry blossoms
that we dip in cornmeal and fry from the butter
of a neighbor’s cow. 
The oak and beech disappear as I climb 
further to fir, larch, and pine. 
I pick edelweiss and arnica 
to set in the blue glass vase on our table. 
We eat the polenta with what we have gathered, 
and Mutti is always angry, 
Vati a traveling tailor and never around, 
hungry stepchildren. 

Once we accidently ate poisonous mushrooms. 
I knew something was wrong when the August light
turned orange and from the faces of Russian soldiers
emerged black beetles, 
and my brother lay holding his stomach and vomiting. 

My stomach is full of knives. 
It is an empty cavern, a cave
where my dead mother dwells below budding breasts. 

Sometimes I want to cross the River Mur
and never return. 
Sometimes the river roils in my body
and I pull the sun into me. 
Sometimes I see a golden eagle on the elm tree. 
He looks royal, 
as if he’s won a war.

She was six and lived in an old castle. 
During the war there were no men, no fathers, 
and when the women told her they were fighting, 
she didn’t understand. 
The sirens were like the cry of wounded men, 
and sometimes they woke her
when she dreamed about her mother sewing blouses
or dolls with capes,  
red like raspberries sprinkled with sugar. 

Later there were men in uniforms.
A German soldier once whittled  a wooden doll for her
with a head scarf nailed on top, 
and later the English soldiers gave her roses. 
Close up, the soldiers, 
with their beards and cigarettes and uniforms, 
did not scare her, but when she saw them
in the distance, silhouettes like shadows, they did. 
Once she went into the woods to pick raspberries
and heard a noise. 
She thought they were soldiers and her heart 
skipped, but instead a deer crashed 
through the forest, hopping among the brambles, 
its coat the color of earth, 
eyes big and black as an eclipsed moon. 
Another time she looked at a mountain
up where the trees thinned out,
and thought the lone trees were Russian soldiers
coming down to take her away. 

When the fighting came too close, 
the war drove them from the castle. 
Her mother buried their belongings in the box—
the precious tea kettle with roses on it, the documents—
but she took the wooden doll with the head scarf and the nails. 

Nails were like men, 
the way they stood straight on the mountaintops, 
the way they scattered when God spilled them as He built a mountain,
the way they held Jesus on his cross, 
and sometimes she imagined her father holding the doll, 
his arms thick like the branches of the ash tree
that stood bare in winter with nothing left to give
but hope for spring.