1947, THE YEAR I ENTERED THE WORLD

Mother, born in Upstate New York, sang Edith Piaf’s La Vie en Rose. 
Giacometti’s sculptures, like Camp Survivors, were lean, spectral.           
Simone de Beauvoir resumed penning The Second Sex.         
Chain-smoking, bedridden, George Orwell scribbled a 1984 draft. 
Thelonious Monk held music in his hands, sculpted percussive attacks, twists, and silences. 
The famine in Russia rekindled the belly-fire of my Russian Father’s boyhood starvation. 

Nursing at my mother’s breast, I heard Father say, In Russia, children are starving. 
Mother’s voice, throaty, drowned him out with Piaf’s La Vie.  
My parent’s jazz like Monk’s percussive attacks, was filled with twists     silences. 
Our blue living room was afloat with specters.                                                          
My parents’ cigarette smoke wreathed and twisted in the updraft.           
Cigarettes tamped down arguments and led to a schmoozy silence that drifted into sex. 

In my bassinet in their bedroom, I smelled their musky scent. 
At those moments, Mother freed Father from memories of starvation.                                       
The radiator with its pan of water on top hissed away all drafts.   
When waking from a milky dream, I cried, and Mother rose.          
She was all rainbowed motes, pastel speckles.             
She held music in her hands and      silence.                                

When she held me close, I sensed music in her  silence. 
Her nylon nightgown was damp with milk and musky from sex. 
More like a Rubens than a Giacometti, her skin was every pastel of the spectrum. 
Mother rekindled Father, sated his terror of starvation.  
Mornings, she wiped the Cold Cream from her face and pinched her cheeks to make them rosy. 
The radiator with the pan of water on top hissed away the drafts.      

The radiator’s sibilance hissed away drafts. 
When Mother held me close, there was music in her silence. 
O, the spell she cast when she hummed Piaf’s La Vie. 
Her nightgown still damp with milk and musky from sex. 
She fended off Father’s sorrow for those he lost to starvation. 
Her skin held every pastel of the spectrum. 

Her cousin, Rochelle, murdered by a Nazi in France, was now a specter. 
Mother’s last letter to her penned on thin blue paper, an unsent draft. 
Naming me her cousin’s name brought her salvation.                             
There was music in her sighs. 
I’d be Robert with a rolling R, a silent t, had I been born the opposite sex. 
But it was to me, to me, she sang La Vie.

Mother’s salvation, me, in the flesh, not a specter.
La Vie en Rose, the air adrift
with sighs, silences     and her cousin’s footsteps.