escape

we started locking the room at night seeing

grandfather’s shadow standing next to our beds

a knife in his hand

he said he heard footsteps around the house

and makes sure they don’t drag us into the woods

for good

shortly after he spoke to the dead

for the first time

and fled leaping

the high fence of our yard

so the neighbors witnessed

four days later we found him

on the other side of town

hidden in a ditch

he said he was fleeing and must not return

someone’s chopping people’s heads off

and planting them in the woods

to grow an army

withering

he didn’t get a chance to return with us

to live amongst vixens hedgehogs and does

but the image of orchard

he would give us as a gift each spring

with years flourished into a biosystem of his plums

his systematically rejuvenating big old pear

and the two cherry trees that would redden

always in may

amidst the autumn fusion

we would dig out a tunnel through time

and talk to him through death

overgrown with ivy

full of plum kernels

that nurtured us

once the withering took its turn

autumns ate themselves backwards

no longer of our concern

no one picks plums

and grandfather sits alone

under the old pear

waiting for us to remember

inheritable diseases

a ring a spring another ring and a few coins

all of this they found in grandma’s belly on the x-ray

we stared at the image and could not agree

whether insanity is inheritable or contagious

for years after she wouldn’t come near us

she was a half-doe half-grandma

mud dripping off her hooves

we feared she would dirty us up

she would plant in us the seeds of autumn

that would overgrow us like weeds

saving the vows of my father

behind the belly button

she told me she had plenty of lads and deer

rumor has it they once found her

even with the priest

by the creek

grandma’s eye

she laid full of dust

old maggoty furniture

of a renovated house

not recognizing us

and in a few weeks

she had wilted like a plant under snow

we could have carried her in our arms

along the entire circumference of the earth

so light almost woolen

but we waited for her to drain out

like juice out of the elderflowers

fearing the death that eats away from inside

slow enough to go unnoticed

at the beginning of february

mother found on her bed

only one frozen eye

the other one probably eaten by the cat

and let a whole bush of jasmine

grow out of it

rabbit deaths

we stored death into animals with care

feeding them freshly cut grass and hay

and then drew the same death out of them painlessly

one incision under the neck

rabbit fur always hung from the old walnut tree

like an oversized coat

and next to the fur suit

the muscles we stripped bare

gazed at us in shame

and swayed in the gusts of wind

my father’s stiff body mother

found by the rabbit hutch

one september morning

thus suspecting the axiom

we are rarely aware of

the death we feed to others

sometimes by chance

comes back into ourselves

bird deaths

no one speaks of birds

in whom the winter settles

the light hardens on their feathers

so they drop from the frozen clouds

feeble and full of landscape

winter corrodes the sparrows’ most insistent

inner waymarks

so they plummet through the sky like

kamikaze

into piles of white peace

for generations we have kept the secret

that birds do not die indeed

with the first southern wind

the sunspots in them come alive

taking them back to initial

coordinates

the water had long escaped before the violence

into the earth crust’s cracks and faults

so the forest lake had run dry

only one spring remained

from it drink wild boars and deer

and ghosts that wander

buckshot-packed

out of their heads

like out of acorns

grow a young forest