Happiness Index
To Armenag Arekian
Your children are always grinning, doing backflips,
scaling trees in the black-and-white photos. I wonder
how they lived in so much joy knowing
the way the world can swallow a person.
Could you have imagined it then?
Five years in a cell,
you were fed bread and little else.
I call to you from a place where bodies
slip through hands like loose grain.
I think of your wife alone,
how she ironed collars for men in town.
She stitched them and starched them, carted them
in a wheelbarrow. Last month Mary Lou and I
braided choreg—sprinkled with nigella seeds.
I don’t know if it was the right way.
I believed only what the computer told me
and it rose under soft towels all night.
Those years in prison, whose words did you turn to?
I grasp for yours, but they are lost.
One script shrouded in another.
Why did they hold you and then release you;
the poets being such a burden
and you the enemy after all? Did you
ever long to slip into the fabric
of a different world? Moths can mimic
the flutter of bird wings to ward off predators.
One moth learned to hiss like a snake.
I remember my own body
soft under pastel parchment flowers.
When the nurse held my hand, I wondered
who made them. And I wonder it again now.
Once, I watched a giant oak split then crash
in a cemetery. Do the dead see everything?
What is the suffering to joy index?
Today the land you were forced from is famous
for ice cream. You don’t have to tell me. I know
that not all days are like the day I swam
in the Adriatic then ate zucchini flowers in garlic
and watched an octopus dance while drying in the wind.
