Tonight as my nine-year-old son takes a bath
I sit on the toilet lid beside the abundant bubbles
and read to him from a murder mystery.
Many words he does not know.
Tenant. Testament. Motive.
I think to myself how a warm bath
is a fine place to learn of such things.
*
Barbara writes in her New Year’s letter,
“Something has shifted within me,
and in general I am happier, a curious
and inexplicable sensation!”
It occurs to me that my son would not know
the word inexplicable. It occurs to me
he will someday soon experience
inexplicable changes of his own.
*
Darwin, I read in Szymborska’s poem,
only liked novels with happy endings.
Was it the Dodo that colored him so?
*
Culprit.
Spasm.
Inheritance.
Content.
*
In fact, says Szymborska,
should the book’s final pages disappoint,
it would whip Darwin into such a rage
he would pitch the unhappy ending
and all its dry weight
into the blazing fire.
*
Part of me wishes
I could burn away any unhappiness
that might come to my boy.
Part of me believes in the words
of Alice Herz-Sommers,
the world’s oldest pianist and oldest
holocaust survivor:
even the bad is beautiful,
for it is part of life.
*
Barbara says that she’s brought Szymoborska
to read in the hermitage where she
will spend the holiday.
How I wish I might slip
between the pages of her book,
thin as a note card with a picture of a streamer fish,
so that I might slip out
of the pages and into her lap
and then spend hours with her
in the hermitage taking turns
reading out loud
the poems together.
*
My son, though he’s pruned,
begs me not to stop at Chapter Three.
We’ve just finished the part
with the maggots crawling out
of the man’s eye sockets as he lays
decomposing on a fine Persian rug.
Please, Mama, please, he says.
Just do it, keep reading, please?
*
Though I do not recall
from my own childhood reading
which one of the tenants
murders the man, nor do
I recall how the culprit does the deed,
I do recall that Darwin
would have remained
in his armchair, content.
*
Alice Herz-Sommers, age 110,
still practices piano every day.
Two hours in the morning.
Two hours after lunch.
It was not a happy ending
she was after. Come on out,
I say to my son. Time for bed.
We will read some more tomorrow.